


Planes, Trains, and Bullies

by OughtaKnowBetter



Category: Numb3rs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-02
Updated: 2010-10-02
Packaged: 2017-10-12 09:05:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 63,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/123225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OughtaKnowBetter/pseuds/OughtaKnowBetter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A not so funny thing happened on the way home from a conference...<br/>Winner of 2008 LJ Numb3rs fanfic award</p>
            </blockquote>





	Planes, Trains, and Bullies

It wasn't just 'yes', it was "hell, yes!" And Colby followed it up by saying, "the 'Skins have a home game Monday night when we get into D.C.? Works for me, dude. Gonna be there for three days, right?"

Normally it shouldn't have been a big deal. Don himself had done plenty of cross country escort details, especially when he'd just rookied out of Quantico and the people around him had already demonstrated that they had a little bit more on the ball than a snot-nosed kid straight from school, no matter how promising he looked. Assigning the newest and least senior on his team to the routine mission was standard operating procedure, to be altered if and only if Don, David, or Megan wanted to see the Redskins play football _and_ had nothing more pressing on their collective plates. And, just for the record, neither David nor Megan were rabid 'Skins fans, and neither were they particularly interested in spending a long and lonely weekend in the nation's capital which was well-known for emptying out on those afore-mentioned week ends, leaving even the hookers begging for hand outs until Monday rolled around.

Likewise, Don was not a 'Skins fan, but he _would_ have liked to have taken the detail, except for one small item: Fat Manny's trial was in full swing, with Don's testimony scheduled for approximately one PM, Pacific Standard Time. The airline tickets that would take the escort and his charge on the flight to D.C. bore the departure time of ten twelve AM, PST, and altering those tickets would cause the charge to arrive too late for his preliminary meeting with The Powers That Be at the NSA, the agency who had very politely asked the FBI to provide the escort. Don would have put up with the boredom, the loneliness of the D.C. scene, if it were not for the directive from above forbidding him to ditch the trial. Don would stay and testify, Colby would go on escort duty. End of story.

Not fair, but, as Don reflected, nobody had promised that life would be fair. It wasn't fair that Charlie had gotten to be with their mother all through those years at Princeton, and Don had not. It wasn't fair that Don had bach'ed it with his father for those same years, and Charlie had not. It wasn't fair that Charlie had gotten all the brains and the tutors and the world bowing at the feet of his genius. It wasn't fair that Don got to gloat when a particularly scum-sucking low-life went down with Don's handcuffs snapped around his wrists, untying the grateful hostage who had just seen his or her life flash before his or her eyes, and all Charlie could do was _wish_ that he could make a difference in some victim's life instead of saying, "I helped by adding two plus two in a back room at FBI Headquarters."

Yeah, life wasn't fair. This particular escort duty consisted of accompanying a certain well-known mathematician with the same last name as Don himself to a very hush-hush meeting with someone in Washington. Don didn't know who it was, didn't know why or what for, and—frankly—didn't care. Washington politics bored him, and the farther away from it he stayed, the happier he was. But he would have liked the opportunity to sit on a jet with his brother for several hours. Didn't have to talk—the Eppes men were not particularly big on the whole sharing-of-feelings routine—but just accompanying the man would have been a good way to bond. Charlie would have dragged out his computer once they were airborne, and Don would have alternated between scanning the passengers for terrorists that had been missed by LAX security—not likely—and pretending to do some crossword puzzle while actually looking over Charlie's shoulder and trying to figure out what the man was working on. Yeah, that would have been a good way to spend a weekend, especially since it would mean that Don would get a couple of compensatory days off for all the hard work that he put in, sitting around waiting for Charlie to be ready to go home.

Life was full of little disappointments. Fat Manny got _another_ postponement—at two PM, when Charlie and Colby were already thirty thousand feet up in the air—and Don's father offered companionship in return for the opportunity to help the man clean out the attic. Better than nothing; Don discovered that his baseball glove, the one that took him through ninth grade, had crawled up into the rafters to disintegrate and was now ripe for the trash heap. He'd always wondered what had happened to it, and he now suspected his little brother of hiding it up there just to annoy him. Don had initially cheered, he remembered, when the decision was made for Charlie to go across the country for college. _Get the kid out from under my feet and out of my way._

So here it was, almost one o'clock in the afternoon on Tuesday, and Colby and Charlie were due to land back in L.A. in another hour. Colby had called ahead; the meeting between Charlie and whoever in the NSA had gone like clockwork—unlike Don's meeting with Fat Manny—and the pair had gotten back onto the return flight as scheduled. Charlie hadn't even brought any work back with him, said that he'd been able to complete the task while there, and that The Powers That Be were ecstatic to have their problem solved so quickly. Score one for Mr. Mathematics, and, Charlie smirked, another fat government-issued paycheck would be clearing his account very soon. The whole trip had been uneventful, Colby had said while waiting for the plane to take off from the Reagan National. He'd still keep an eye out for anyone looking to snatch Charlie, but it seemed a bit pointless now that the job was done. Even Charlie was planning on working on Friday's Advanced Diff EQ lecture on the flight home, just to pass the time. Colby had a crossword puzzle, the one that he hadn't finished on the flight to D.C.

"Don," Megan called from her desk, hanging up the phone with a puzzled frown on her face. "Director's looking for you. Head up to his office."

What was that all about? Don sighed. Director pissed because Fat Manny's lawyers had been able to delay the inevitable yet again? Not Don's fault, and the director knew it. Another high profile assignment, one that hadn't hit the local tabloids? More likely. Don trotted up the stairs, suspecting that he wouldn't have time for his usual work out later on this evening, using the stairs as his back-up plan to keep himself in shape.

Don knew that there was something very wrong the moment he stepped into Area Director D'Angelo's office. There was something very _very_ wrong, and it involved Don himself. The Area Director had a poker face to bluff an opponent with a royal flush lying on the table in front of him, but Don could still read it in his eyes.

"Don, you deserve to hear about this first…"

* * *

Colby had rearranged the seating to his liking, first class all the way _and_ Charlie away from the aisle so that no one could get to him unless they went through Colby first. The movie would have been disappointing if Colby had been allowed to watch it—some chick flick that interested him not at all—but Colby couldn't get into a movie and keep an eye on his assignment. Just because Charlie had finished his job for the NSA didn't mean that there wasn't anyone out to get him, maybe looking to weasel out what the job had been. Charlie wasn't a trained field agent, and Colby was under no illusions that Charlie would be able to stand up to an enemy agent for any length of time. Colby would be keeping the eyelids peeled, just in case there was someone out there with Charlie's name on his list of 'most wanted for personal interrogation on matters best left alone'. No, better to keep the man safe until they were back on arid California soil. Take precautions, just in case.

Colby's gun was hidden in his holster, there by special arrangement with airline security. He'd already made contact with the air marshal riding on the flight, a non-descript dude keeping a low profile in the back of the plane, well before taking off. And there was another wrinkle; there was a white collar criminal being extradited to California to stand trial for embezzlement and insider trading. Colby recognized the dude from the newspaper articles he'd been reading while waiting for Charlie to finish doing his thing: Frank Landers, ex-Chief Financial Officer for Eminex Industries, one of the dot.com's that had made it big and now was taking a nose-dive because of actions by the CFO, the CEO, and a few other types with capitalized initials for jobs. Landers had his own babysitter equipped with a handgun in its holster, a babysitter that kept Landers in business class instead of First, and in a row that had only two seats to it instead of three. Landers' babysitter was a guy named Magarian, a no-nonsense cop who had confided to both Colby and the air marshal that Landers was rolling on his CEO and three board members for a substantial reduction in his sentence, hence the trip back to L.A. for an in-depth discussion with a certain federal judge.

And there was something going on, something that was putting an itch right between Colby's shoulder blades, right where he couldn't scratch it in the proverbial sense. He hadn't figured out what it was—and to be honest, it might just be an over-active imagination honed to a fine point by too much spare time after the 'Skins game which they _lost,_ Colby groaned—but there had been a couple of times when that little spidey sense had saved his hide. It was like that time in Afghanistan, on the trail with his squad, thought that they had a hot lead on Bin Laden and it turned out to be an invitation to an ambush with the Americans on the wrong end of the 'bush. There'd been little twitches in his tailbone then, too, and he'd mentioned it to his captain, who'd sent out another scout, and Colby could continue this run-on sentence for another few phrases but the point was that the Americans went home without a scratch and the rebels couldn't say the same. Didn't get Bin Laden—missed him, they thought, by a couple of hours—but nobody went home in a body bag. That was a plus, in Colby's estimation, and a procedure that he'd like to continue well into his nineties and certainly into retirement.

Three guns on this flight. Colby didn't like it, but there wasn't anything that he could do about it, not thirty thousand feet in the air. And Charlie's job was over, and it wasn't really likely that anyone would be after Don's little brother; not now. With any luck, they'd arrive at LAX without anyone knowing about the hidden hardware, and Colby could drop Charlie off at his house, call in to Don—who'd have his hide if he didn't call to confirm a safe arrival—and then head home for a real shower instead of one of those little lukewarm jobs in that ever-so-quaint place they'd put him up at—

 _Wham!_

It _felt_ like an air pocket, but it didn't sound like one. Colby'd been in plenty of aircraft over Afghanistan when he'd been stationed there, and had the greatest admiration for how the pilots in his unit had dodged a hell of a lot of rocket launchers to keep his hide and theirs intact. Of all the things to happen, the one thing he hadn't expected was for that to happen here in the good ole U.S. of A. They were over the _Rockies,_ for cripes' sake. Those old mountain men might be a little bit on the crazy side with a major helping of ornery, but rocket launchers tended to be a mite expensive for their pocketbooks, not to mention too high-tech. Those mountain geezers tended to look toward buckshot at close range, not rocket launchers for 747's. But the sound, to Colby, was unmistakable.

Several things happened at once. The sixteen screams, mostly but not completely from the various ladies on the flight, were entirely understandable. So was Charlie's frantic scrabbling to protect his computer, to shut it down before losing whatever data he was working on. _Gotta expect that from a math dude like Charlie._ Most alarming was the sudden and dramatic tilt that threw everything not tied down toward the opposite side of the cabin. Colby took an inane moment to be grateful; that over-priced water could have landed on him instead of the man across the aisle. Colby reached out to steady the flight attendant, watching to see if anyone was taking advantage of the situation. _This could be planned, guy…_

Yeah, planned. But not by anyone on the flight that Colby could see. Every face that he scanned showed the same terror, the same _what the hell is going on?_ and _we're gonna die!_ Several were scrambling to turn on their cells, hoping to get out one last message before the end.

Colby swallowed hard, felt his ears pop. They were losing altitude fast, and the mountain that he could see through Charlie's window was looming larger and larger. "Buckle in!" he commanded, suiting actions to words by yanking Charlie's loosened belt tight. Charlie yelped, more surprised than anything else.

The laptop. For Colby, the machine morphed into a potential missile ready to go into action upon impact. Mindful of the mathematician, he helped Charlie to finish slipping the thing into its protective case, shoving it firmly under the seat ahead of them, hoping that it wouldn't slip out from underneath to whack someone—with his luck, it would be Colby himself—across the skull.

"Cover your head," he ordered. There was little enough that he could do now, no other measures that he could take to protect his assignment from impending disaster. "Protect your face." _Flapping my arms like a bird probably isn't gonna be all that useful. And neither is screaming like a little girl, like the one fifteen rows back._

Crap, the ground is getting closer and closer, and it looks like we're gonna end up on a mountain top.

And it looks like it's gonna hurt…

* * *

Don set his jaw. "I don't care. I'm going."

Area Director D'Angelo shook his head just as firmly. "No, you're not, Eppes. There's nothing you can do out there except get in the way. Our people from the Denver office are all over the mountain, looking for the wreck, and FAA and Mountain Rescue are already in action. We have people scanning satellite photos. If anyone can find them—"

"I'm an experienced tracker." Don had to work to keep from yelling. He'd had plenty of practice in keeping his cool, and he was using every ounce of it now. "I've hunted down people in the backwoods over and over—"

"Right. In New Mexico." D'Angelo was sympathetic, but unyielding. "These are the mountains of Colorado, and it would take several hours to get you out there, hours that you can use to hunt down who did this. You're not going to do your brother or Colby any good by going where you won't be effective. You're going to stay in your office and monitor the situation from there. Is that clear, Don?" D'Angelo too was keeping his cool, feeling for his man and knowing that he had to keep the older Eppes brother under control.

"But—"

"We need to know _why_ that plane went down," D'Angelo interrupted. "That will help us to pull out the survivors safely. Check out the passenger list, figure out who else might be a target. Identify any groups that have motive and opportunity to do this. There's a very good chance that this is simply a horrible accident, but we don't take chances. We check out every angle, rule out every possibility. You know the drill, Eppes. And what about your father? Are you going to let some stranger tell him about this?"

"But—"

D'Angelo picked up the phone on his desk, dialed in a short four digit extension. "Reeves? D'Angelo here. As of right now, you and Sinclair are on a twenty four/seven detail with Eppes. Make sure that one or both of you are with him at all times. Yes, that's right. He's chomping at the bit. I want him where he'll do some good, not out in the field like a loose cannon." The next words were spoken into the handset but aimed at Don Eppes. " _Two_ of our own are on that plane, and I want to know everything about how and why this occurred. Make it happen."

* * *

The calm after the storm. That's what it sounded like to Colby, when his thoughts were clear enough to pay attention to. Most of his mind was taken up by one concept: _crap, that hurts!_

But—got a job to do. Got a man to protect. That was his assignment, and the fact that it was Charlie made it all the more important. _Gotta protect your buddies, watch their backs so that they could watch yours._ Charlie's watching was the cerebral type, but that didn't make it any less important. Man had proven his worth a whole bunch of times.

 _Got a job to do._ Colby levered his eyes open, immediately wished that he hadn't. Immediately wished that he didn't have to again. There wasn't a lot of light, not with all the trees on the mountainside filtering it out, but what photons there were was enough to send stabs of pain washing through his skull.

"Colby!" It was Charlie. "Colby, are you all right?"

 _Stupid question, dude. Not gonna tell you that._ Colby tried to move, and that sent a wave of nausea-inducing agony streaking through his shoulder. He choked back a groan, resenting the small pieces that escaped from his lips.

"Don't move, Colby. I'll get help."

 _From where, dude?_ "Charlie," he croaked. He grabbed onto the mathematician's arm. "Status?"

"We're on some mountain," Charlie told him uncertainly, unsure of what Colby was asking. "We're trying to get out of the plane, in case it blows up."

Right. Just like the civilian he was. Plane wasn't likely to blow up, not unless someone stuck a bomb next to the fuel tank. That sort of stuff only happened in action flicks with more imagination than sense. But there was someone on this plane that someone else didn't want to see living, and Colby needed to make sure that the first someone wasn't Charlie. It could be the CFO dude, it could be someone else, but it could be Charlie. And Charlie was Colby's assignment. And his friend.

Charlie kept on. "Can you move?" he asked worriedly. "We have to get out of here."

 _Yeah, we do. But not for the reasons you think, Charlie. That little itch between my shoulder blades? It's turned into a hell of a big bull's eye, with your picture on it, guy. Or do you know of any other time when an American jumbo jet got shot out of the sky for carrying a bunch of families toward Disneyland?_

Colby gritted his teeth. "Give me a hand," he requested.

Charlie slipped his arm underneath Colby's good one, hoisting away, needing to re-position his feet to get enough leverage.

Blackness. _Crap._ The blood tried to drain out of Colby's face and out of his brain. Colby swallowed hard, commanding consciousness to remain for another few minutes. There was a bruise on his ribcage, a holster-sized bruise that suggested that his gun was still intact, and that was before he considered the small inferno that his arm had become. He hung onto Charlie, trying to remain upright for the few minutes that he needed to get Charlie out of the plane and closer toward safety. Nice to know that the gun was there, but Colby didn't trust himself with the thing in his hand. Too much chance of it going off in the wrong direction.

Who was getting _who_ out of the plane? Colby was just around for the ride; Charlie was doing all the work and doing a surprisingly good job of it, keeping Colby's feet underneath him.

Then he was lowering Colby to the ground. The cold earth felt good beneath him, and Colby allowed everything except his brain to collapse in exhaustion.

"You're bleeding," Charlie said worriedly. "Let me get some bandages."

Yeah, that was right. Something airborne inside the cabin had stabbed him through the shoulder. Colby was lucky that it hadn't been through his head, or there'd be a dead FBI agent on board that downed jet.

Crap, Charlie had left his side! Colby cursed the blood loss that kept him from thinking clearly. Then Charlie was back, wrapping something white and tight around his shoulder. It hurt, but it was better. More than that: having Charlie where Colby could watch him was better yet. Not that the FBI agent could do anything, but it was the thought that counted.

Colby mustered all his brainpower. "Charlie, talk to me. Who's living, and who's dead?"

"What?"

Colby swallowed hard. "Charlie, listen to me. We may be in whole boat load of crap. Did you see who died in the crash?"

Charlie still didn't understand, but he did his best to follow orders. "There were a lot of people who died. There's a lot of blood."

Not good enough. Colby closed his eyes, tried to figure out what to say. "Charlie, look for a big guy, no beard, sitting next to a business suit. They had a small black laptop case with them—looks like yours, kind of—and the suit had a blue handkerchief sticking out of his coat pocket. Where are they? You see 'em?"

"I'll see." Charlie was gone before Colby could tell him to be careful. Dammit, he'd wanted Charlie to stay where he could watch him. Some bodyguard he was turning out to be. His charge was running around in a place with wild animals, guns, and possible terrorists—or who else could have had an interest in shooting down a jet in a company trying its best not to go bankrupt with these gas prices?—and here Colby was, flat on his back on the cold, hard ground. And his shoulder was killing him. He tried to crane his neck around to see what it was that had impaled him, but the pain was too great. Spots swam blackly before his eyes, and he sank back down.

Charlie was back. "Colby? Colby?"

"I'm awake," Colby muttered, trying to convince himself. "What did you find out? And stay with me, from now on," he ordered before he could forget once again.

"Why?"

"What did you find out?" Colby ignored the question. He needed answers, not more questions. "What about the Wall Street dude?"

Charlie lowered his voice. There were people around, most of them crying though the hysteria was dying down, some wandering aimlessly and looking for something—anything—to make this disaster a little bit better to bear and others simply flopped onto the forest floor, unable to believe that this had happened, in shock. "Colby, they're dead. Both of them. How did you know?"

Colby frowned. Charlie sounded as though he thought that Colby knew something. _People die in a plane crash, dude. Why the question?_ "Know what?"

Colby could barely hear Charlie's answer. "Colby, those two were shot! Through the back of the neck—execution style, you guys call it. That's what the other passengers are saying. I didn't see them, but that's what the others are saying. Colby, how did you know?"

Crap. This was _so_ not looking good. All this, on top of the Redskins losing while Colby was visiting D.C. Colby was strongly wishing that he could have testified at Fat Manny's trial and let Don take this detail like he'd wanted to.

Too many things were adding up. But Colby needed one more detail: "Did you see the guy's laptop?"

Charlie frowned. "No. No, I didn't, although I wasn't really looking for it. It wasn't anywhere near them, not under the seat and not across the aisle, if it got flung there."

"It was missing?"

"I didn't see it," Charlie confirmed. "At least, I didn't see it anywhere close by. Someone else could have picked it up. Lots of people on this flight have laptops. Colby, why the interest in the laptop? Who were those two guys?" Another thought hit him. "Colby, how did they get shot? Wouldn't someone have heard the sound of gunfire?"

"Not with silencers, not through the seat cushions, and especially not while going down. Too much screaming." Colby thought hard, and he didn't like where his thoughts were going. "Charlie, listen closely. Those two were a Federal witness and a cop, heading to testify at an embezzlement trial."

Charlie sucked in his breath. "You think someone murdered them to keep that guy from testifying?"

Leap of faith, here. "No, Charlie. I think someone mistook them for you and me." Colby took a deep breath. This wasn't easy, lying flat on the cold ground and looking up at his charge. No less than three sharps rocks were digging into his spine, and he couldn't do anything about it. "Answer me straight, Charlie. Do you have anything on your laptop that could be considered national security stuff?"

Charlie's eyes narrowed. "Colby—"

"No time for beating around the bush, Charlie. Yes or no?"

Charlie bit his lip, and there was a haunted look to the mathematician that Colby didn't like. "Yes."

"Big?"

"Very big. Hostile nation type big."

"All right." Yeah, Colby was right. He and Charlie were hip deep in trouble. "Listen to me, Charlie, and don't interrupt. Somebody shot down this plane, and it wasn't angry stockholders annoyed over losing their life savings in a dot.com debacle. There aren't too many board members who can get hold of a ground to air missile launcher. Besides, why shell out for a couple of hit men on a plane if you're going to knock the bird out of the sky? No, this sounds like your basic 'hostile nation' stuff. With me so far?"

"Yeah." Charlie's eyes were large and round, and he wasn't saying much. But he was listening with both ears.

"Which means that someone is going to nosing around, looking for you and your laptop, Charlie. They're gonna want to make sure that you and me died in the crash." Colby took a deep breath, commanded the nerves in his injured arm to go off duty. "Listen, dude: I don't know who to trust here. Stick close to me for now. There'll be rescuers coming real soon; they must have seen us going off of the radar. They'll come and get us."

"And then I can call Don, and the local FBI'll come and get us," Charlie nodded.

Colby shook his head, wished he hadn't. It made him dizzy. _Must be losing more blood than I thought._ "We don't know who to trust," he repeated, "and we don't know if they slipped anyone into any of the local offices. There must be a reason that they chose _here_ to take down the plane. These guys are terrorists: always planning, down to the last detail. Charlie, if they get you alone, they'll kill you and take your laptop. We can't let that happen."

Charlie sat back on his heels beside Colby. "Okay, no local FBI help," he said, taking Colby's analysis at face value. "What do we do?"

 _As if I could do anything right now._ His helplessness hurt more than his arm. Colby cast around for a plan. "You still have your laptop?"

"I can get it." Charlie started to get up.

Colby grabbed him. "Where is it, Charlie? Don't leave my side, dude. You're more important than that hunk of wiring. Get someone else to get it for you."

"I can do that." Charlie motioned to someone outside of Colby's range, sent the young man off. "What next?"

"Call Don." There was no doubt in Colby's mind. "Let him know what's going on. He's the one person we can trust. He'll make things happen."

"Got it." Charlie pulled out his cell, turned it on and made a face. "Battery's getting low, but it should be okay." He flipped the small silver case open, tabbed in the sequence. "Don?"

 _"Charlie? You're alive! Are you all right? Where are you? What about Colby?"_

"We're okay," Charlie started to say, when Colby gestured for the phone.

"Don? We may have a situation here." Colby filled his team leader in with a minimum of quiet words, ending with, "we're safe for the moment, Don, but I'm not liking this."

 _"Neither am I. Listen, the two of you keep a low profile. I'm going to commandeer a fast transport out there as soon as I can figure out the closest city to land in. You cooperate with the locals, try not to let them know who you are until you have to. Got it?"_

"I'm with you, Don."

 _"Good. Give me back to Charlie."_

"He wants to talk to you," Colby said, handing the cell phone back to its owner. Enough, for the moment. Colby closed his eyes, wishing that he wouldn't be called upon for any heroics, knowing that there was a strong possibility that his wish wouldn't come true. _Always liked the concept of the tooth fairy, too…_

Charlie accepted it, held it to his ear. "Don?"

 _"How bad off is Colby?"_

Charlie flicked his gaze over his traveling companion. "Not good."

 _"How did it happen?"_

"Don, we were in a plane crash—"

 _"I know that, Charlie. What did the wound look like? Jagged, or a small and neat little hole? Like from a gun with a silencer on it?"_ Don's voice was harsh with a ragged edge.

Another glance, this one almost furtive. "Um, I don't really know. I didn't look that closely. The sight of blood…"

Sigh. _"Not important at the moment, Charlie. Listen, stay put until I come for you. Cooperate with the rescuers, but don't tell anyone who you are, what you were doing, and don't let that damn laptop out of your sight. Don't trust anyone, hear me? And that includes the local officials. And the FAA guys."_

Charlie swallowed hard. "I hear you, Don."

 _"Good. I'm heading out right now. I'll see you as soon as I can. Keep me posted on developments; okay, buddy?"_

"Right." Charlie slowly closed the cell, ignoring the warning beep that signaled the nearing end of useful battery life.

"Charlie?" Colby's eyes flickered over the mathematician's face, trying to read the emotions flitting across.

"I think I hear the rescuers," Charlie said woodenly, unable to keep from looking at the white bandage that he'd tacked across Colby's shoulder. What was underneath there? This was a plane crash; blood was to be expected, wasn't it? Why hadn't he tried to clean away some of it, see what was underneath? Had Colby been shot through the seat cushion, the noise swallowed up by the diving plane, like the other two in the back seats?

Had they tried to do the same thing to Charlie himself?

Charlie wasn't certain that he wanted to go back to look at the seat where he had been just minutes ago.

* * *

"They're alive. Both of them." It was the first words out of Don's mouth, and the first thing that Megan and David wanted to hear. "Colby's banged up, but Charlie's okay. It was a bad one; Colby said there are dead bodies all around."

"There's more." They both had been listening to one half of the conversation.

"There's more," Don agreed. "You heard about Landers, the CFO who's rolling on his friends? Dead, with his guard. And not from the crash, either. It sounds like someone on the plane seized the moment and took them both out permanently. There's not going to be any testimony for the prosecution on the Eminex trial."

"So how does that affect Charlie and Colby?" Megan asked. "They should be safe, right?"

Don shook his head. "Colby thinks that it wasn't just a few bad gusts of wind that took the plane down. Said it sounded like a missile; not that the FAA is talking about that. They'll be keeping that from the media until they have everyone safe—or so they think. I don't even know if a missile showed up on anyone's radar." He looked grim. "Megan, you're on that. Find out what the local radar showed. Talk to both the FAA and the military."

"You're thinking that maybe someone was out to get Charlie, too." That only barely qualified as guesswork on Megan's part.

"I'm thinking that we'd better use that as our working premise," Don said. "Listen, I want to get out there ASAP. Megan, can you handle D'Angelo—"

"No need, Eppes. I heard." No one had heard or seen the Area Director approach. Don started, but D'Angelo wasn't finished. "Head out to the landing pad. I'll clear it for one of the choppers to take you and Sinclair to where ever you need to go. Reeves, you stay here and monitor the operation from this end. I want twice daily updates. What's the surprise, Eppes?" he added, noting Don's astonishment. "You thought I wasn't going to let you go?"

"Well, sir, earlier—"

" _Earlier—_ " D'Angelo stressed the word just enough, "—earlier we didn't have any reason to send you out there. Earlier there wasn't any reason to believe that this was anything more than a horrible accident. Earlier, there was a certain father who needed to learn of this from his _son,_ not some media reporter. That was before we discovered that the Eminex people were on the passenger list. That was before we learned that the plane may have— _may_ have, I said—been taken down by a weapon of war, here on our own turf, stateside. And that was before we learned that our agent and our consultant are still alive." He paused. "What are you waiting for, Eppes? Formal, written orders on an engraved silver platter?"

"No, sir." Don fled, David in his wake.

* * *

Good points, bad points. The good? The Mountain Rescue Team had arrived. Not being expected to travel anywhere under his own power was another. Colby suffered himself to be lifted onto the litter, _suffering_ being the operative word, forcing the yelp to stay sequestered somewhere deep inside. True to his word, Charlie was staying right by Colby's side, even helping to lift the agent into the air to get him situated on the stretcher, the laptop swinging by its strap over Charlie's shoulder.

The bad? The lifting process had almost caused Colby to pass out, leading him to wonder just how bad his shoulder was. For himself, Colby had little fear. The rescuers had arrived, and the majority—if not all—were innocent of being terrorists out to get Charlie, and they would be hustling to get Colby himself to medical treatment as quickly and as safely as they could. Colby and all the rest of the injured would be transferred to area facilities.

Another bad point: that would leave Charlie unprotected. The man was a genius, true, but he hadn't had any training in self-defense or knowing how to evade enemy agents or even how to dodge a bullet with his name on it. Sure, Don was on his way, and Colby didn't think that even Area Director D'Angelo could stop the older Eppes brother now that he knew what was happening and where Charlie and Colby were, but that still left several hours with Charlie pretty much on his own. _Not real happy with that, dude._

They loaded Colby and his litter onto a large size ATV, the road being non-existent, and Colby didn't look forward to an hour or more of bouncing up and down over the rocks. But when Charlie started to clamber on board beside him, the mountain rescue people stopped him. "Sorry, sir; injured only. We'll come back for you as soon as we can. Wait with the others, please."

"But—" Charlie looked helplessly at Colby, wondering what to do. "He's—he's my brother," he lied lamely.

"I understand that, sir." The rescuer had been through this scene before, and he knew his lines even if Charlie didn't. "Wait with the others, please. We'll come back for you as soon as we can, and then you can be with him."

Colby stepped in, figuratively and not literally. Actual walking was going to have to wait for another day. "Let me talk to him for a minute," he requested, "then my 'brother' will be out of your hair."

The rescuer nodded. "Just a moment or two. You have until I finish loading on your fellow passenger." He walked off after another litter bearing someone else injured in the crash.

Colby didn't waste any time. "Charlie! Get my gun, and hurry. Don't let anyone see that you have it."

"What?"

"Hurry it up, dude. Listen, keep to yourself until Don gets here, but don't be out of sight of everyone else. Crowds are your safest protection—ow! Watch it, Charlie," Colby hissed as the removal of the holster jostled his arm.

"Sorry."

"You got it? Good. Hide it; don't let anyone see you with it, or there'll be questions that we don't want to answer. Wear the holster under your arm, like me and Don. Nobody'll know that it's there, as long as you don't take off your jacket. Be careful, Charlie," Colby finished, mindful of the rescuer coming back with another litter and plenty of ears from fellow rescuers along side.

The rescuers loaded another passenger onto the ATV, onto the other side, this one an older man with no obvious injuries that Colby could see but the gray face of the man suggested that old age was catching up with him at a most inopportune time. Charlie's eyes stayed big and round, barely able to process all this real life. Colby longed to squeeze the man's shoulder; anything to bring the mathematician out of his fugue state.

"Hang in there, Charlie. Listen for Don, okay?"

"Okay," Charlie echoed woodenly, watching as they finished loading on the other man. The ATV's engine roared.

* * *

Don was manning the radio, David in the back of the chopper. They could barely hear anything over the roar of the chopper blades, but that didn't stop them from trying.

There was information coming in over the radio from Megan, and Don pressed the ear piece closer to try to block out the extraneous sound. "What? What's the name again? Spell it." He turned to David, who was struggling with a map, trying to keep the folds under control. "Place called Crawford, with a 'C'. Southwest of Denver, other end of the state. Look for Route 92, a north-south road. That's where the staging area is, closest point of civilization for the rescue teams." He listened again to the earphones, struggling to make sense over the noise. "They're starting to bring in the survivors." It hurt to say that, but not as much as it should have, Don reflected. He already knew that Charlie and Colby were among those survivors, and the relief that he felt edged out any sorrow that he should have felt for the people that he didn't know. _Way of the world, Eppes. Be grateful that Charlie and Colby are still alive. Could have been worse._

The chopper pilot gave him the thumbs up, buzzing downward a bit so that they could pick up some of the large green street signs on the highways far below. Don nodded. 'IFR' was supposed to mean 'Instrument Flight Rules' for use during bad weather and poor visibility. In reality, pilots joked, it stood for 'I Fly the Roads'. The pilot nodded at the map that David pushed forward, putting his finger onto the tiny dot that represented the town of Crawford. "Another couple hours, maybe a half hour beyond that," he estimated at the top of his lungs.

Don tightened his lips. More than two hours, then more time spent trying to rent a vehicle to get to where Charlie and Colby were. Crawford was small, only about three hundred and fifty residents, Megan had told him from a quick 'net search, and Don had no doubt that the injured would be ferried to the nearest medical facility as soon as possible. So that would be where Colby would end up, and would get the finest care available once they found out that he was an FBI agent. But Charlie? Don had no doubt that Colby had instructed the younger Eppes to stay under the proverbial radar as much as possible, which meant that the man would be where ever the rest of the passengers had been taken to. And that, Don knew, could be anywhere. Anywhere where a determined terrorist could get to him.

 _Could be jumping at straws, Eppes. This could all be coincidence. It could have been bad weather that took the jet down. Hit men were after Landers, and the guard got in the way. Could be sheer luck that Colby got crunched and Charlie, sitting right next to him, escaped unscathed. Colby could have heard thunder, mistook it for that damn missile that's scaring the crap out of all of us._

Yeah, could be. All Don knew is that he'd feel a hell of a lot better once he saw his brother safe and sound and surrounded by Don and David.

* * *

 _Stick with the crowd, keep to yourself._ Charlie chanted that to himself like a mantra. Was he safe here? Those two that had gotten shot; who had done it? Had the assassin or assassins died in the crash? Or were they waiting for an opportunity to kill Colby and himself?

No, that was silly. Charlie tried to put it in terms of a logic puzzle. If P: if they were after Landers because of the Eminex trial, then not Q: they wouldn't be after an FBI agent and a consultant. Two totally unrelated cases. It was just coincidence that they'd been on the same flight. If Charlie cared to use up some of the battery life on his laptop, he could calculate the odds of the two events being related. Even at a glance, he'd estimate it to somewhere in the neighborhood of a couple million to one.

All of which meant that all he had to do was wait for Don to come get him. Actually, to put it another way, he was safe and this was all a lot of overkill on the part of security-happy agents who needed a good excuse to justify the excursion. Talk about reality: the best thing for Charlie to do was to wait for the Mountain Rescue squad to finish ferrying the injured down the mountain and medical help, take him and the rest of the uninjured passengers to where ever the FAA had set up to take statements about what happened—and Charlie could already hear several such passengers starting to complain about how late this would make them getting into Los Angeles, which suggested that the terror was dying down in favor of annoyance over the inconvenience—and then simply make his way back home in the company of Don and his team. Charlie's job in Washington was completed—or so everyone was being given to believe—and there was no danger for him personally; at least, no more than for anyone else. And the odds of dying in a plane crash were roughly half a million to one. The odds of it happening a second time had to be astronomical. If it weren't for the fact that Don was already on his way out here, Charlie would have simply headed over to the nearest transportation hub with the FAA officials, gone to Denver or perhaps Santa Fe, and taken the next available flight back home.

But Don was already en route, probably with a wad of cotton batting with him to roll Charlie up into; Charlie was getting pretty tired of the proprietary air that Don was carrying around with him these days. He sighed. Disappearing from the rescue camp would put his brother into a tizzy, and take their father along with him. No, for the moment, Charlie would simply stay under cover as Colby had instructed. It was the easiest way to get along until they all got back to Los Angeles. And, Charlie rationalized, it would look strange for Colby's 'brother' to run off and leave him behind.

Okay, Charlie would play at being a good little terrified passenger who'd just survived a plane crash. He'd go down the mountain with the rescue team, he'd talk nicely to the FAA officials who were undoubtedly gathering like vultures. He even offer to help calculate the various trajectories that would demonstrate how the unpredictable weather had caused the plane to dip down to an unsafe level, perhaps even grow some ice on the wings. After all, he was a world-renowned scholar, called in frequently by several branches of the government to solve mathematically-based problems of several varieties. It would look odd if he _didn't_ volunteer. Colby's gun in his possession? Hopefully Don would get here soon, and Charlie could turn it over to his brother—his real brother. The one who had a permit to carry it in a concealed fashion and who would be just as happy not to have Charlie holding onto the business end of it.

Blankets. All the survivors had blankets. It seemed to be the evening's fashion as the sun darted swiftly down behind the remainder of the Rockies rolling off into the distance. Someone had mentioned something about this being near or in a national preserve named for Gunnison, whoever that was, and Charlie stared into the forest as the small vans ferried them out of the wilderness and into a makeshift camp outside of the town hall of a little place called Crawford. The town hall building itself simply wasn't big enough to accommodate the hundred or so survivors. Charlie had heard one of the lead rescuers say something about moving the survivors out as quickly as possible so that the camp could be turned into a forensics area. _Morgue,_ he thought dolefully. _That's the correct word. Dead bodies, waiting to be identified and claimed._ Forensics, in Charlie's admittedly limited experience, required vast amounts of resources to identify bodies and how they met their demise, all in a fashion suitable for presenting to a judge and jury. This area would more properly be termed 'morgue'. The forensics part was going to be easy; simply take the passenger list, add in the crew, subtract out the names of the living, and select from the remaining options. What could be easier? Never mind the tears that would go into the task. And it wasn't as if there would be a lot of questions as to how people died. There tended to be a lot of crunching when a jumbo jet hit a mountain.

Numbers were so much better to work with. No tears. A lot of frustration, when he couldn't think of the proper theorem, or if the proper theorem didn't exist yet, but no tears. Numbers didn't cry. Numbers didn't insist on having feelings. There were times when they were much better to work with.

What was wrong with him? People all around were still sobbing quietly, the hysteria finally over now that rescue was at hand, others hugging and holding hands, with one small family weeping in a corner of the makeshift camp—a family with a hole in it.

Charlie turned away. There was nothing he could do to help, nothing but intrude on grief. Other workers passed out food, more blankets, one of them wondering aloud if the next wave of relief would be ferrying the survivors elsewhere or bringing cots and sleeping paraphernalia until better arrangements could be made.

He supposed that he ought to be doing something, waiting for Don to arrive. He cast around, looking for a task, lit on the rescue worker huddled over her lists, and remembered that he really ought to be keeping track of Colby. Don would want to know, once he finished assuaging his own set of nerves by growling at Charlie for being so foolish as to get involved in a plane crash. Charlie approached the rescue worker, someone who looked as though they were organizing things. "Excuse me?"

"Yes?" Courtesy, but really had too much unpleasantness to deal with to want to spend time talking.

"My—brother," Charlie stumbled over the word. "He was hurt in the crash. Can I see him?"

The woman's face softened. Nastiness wasn't in her nature, but today's word was 'over-worked.' "Sorry, sir. All the injured have already been transported out, some of them to Denver and the rest to Santa Fe. What's his name? Maybe I can give you more information."

"Colby," Charlie said. "Colby Granger."

"Granger." She ran her finger down over the column of names. "Yes, here he is. They air-lifted him out just before you arrived on the van. He's headed for Denver."

"He's going to be all right?"

She bit her tongue on the automatic reassurance that she wanted to give. "We'll do our best. They have some very fine hospitals in Denver. And in Santa Fe," she hastened to add.

Charlie could read her thoughts; if, by chance, Colby had ended up in Santa Fe instead of Denver as her lists told her, she wanted Charlie to think that he was still getting good care. Which he would be, in either place, but any little thing could set off a survivor, and this rescue worker didn't want to be responsible for an hysterical break down on the part of the supposed 'brother'. Charlie left it at that.

"You'll see him soon, Mr. Granger," she added, assuming quite sensibly that two brothers were likely to have the same last name.

Charlie accepted the misnomer, walking off to rejoin the crowd. Yet another worker was waving them onto busses for transport to a larger town that actually possessed a hotel for the night. This one checked him off as Charles Eppes, for that was the name on the list and his boarding pass.

"What about my luggage?" someone behind him in line wanted to know.

"It's part of the accident scene," the rescue worker explained patiently for the twenty-fifth time. The question, Charlie gathered, came up every half dozen passengers or so. "It will be returned to you after the experts from the FAA have a chance to survey the scene." Kind of like a murder scene, Charlie thought. Don't touch anything that might be a clue.

"But, my luggage," the passenger insisted. "It has my medicine in it! I need my medicine!"

"I'm sorry, ma'am," the rescue worker told her. "I don't make the rules. This is now an FAA accident scene, and they're in charge. All items stay where they are until the FAA has a chance to make a determination."

"But it was _carry-on_ luggage," the woman wailed. "That didn't have to go into cargo. You people made me throw out my facial cream," she added angrily. "Do you know how expensive that is?"

"Ma'am, I'm just an emergency response worker," came the tired reply. "Would you like to speak to someone in charge?" _Higher up on the food chain, perhaps?_

"You bet I would," the woman said, trying to merge into anger instead of upset. "He has _his_ carry on," she said, pointing.

At Charlie, with his laptop? Charlie sucked in his breath. _Please don't be pointing at me._ He couldn't lose the laptop to the investigators, not with all the national security stuff on it, and talking to the FAA about it was in strict contradiction to what Colby had told him, as well as his NSA employers. He tried to surreptitiously slide the black leather canvas bag behind his back, hoping that the shoulder strap wouldn't stand out against his suit coat. _Now I'm glad I have the blanket; covers up a lot of stuff._

Nope, she was pointing at a middle-aged, very fit-looking man with a strong fiberglass case in his hand, standing several feet away from Charlie. The man glanced around uneasily, much as Charlie had, hoping that the unhappy passenger had pointed out someone else.

The passenger wasn't about to let him get away. "He has _his_ carry-on," she said loudly. "How come he gets to keep his, and I don't get mine with my _medicine?_ My _medicine,_ " she repeated, "that I need to keep on _living!"_

Nobody needed clarification on the point the woman passenger was trying to make. Her index finger zoomed in like an arrow on the man, dropping only to aim at the case he held gripped in one hand.

"If he can keep his, I can have mine!" she announced. "That's only fair."

"Ma'am, the man in charge of the investigation is over there, in that office," the rescue worker told her, aiming the woman like a self-guided missile. "Perhaps he can help you."

"He'd better," the woman said loudly, trying to batter down the official's defenses before she even arrived, bearing down on the man the worker had indicated.

Good time for a hasty retreat. Charlie worked his way over to the bus taking them to the place that the FAA had designated for the passengers, clambering up onto the bus pressed hastily into service and keeping the blanket tossed around him. He wasn't cold, but the thought of losing his laptop was enough to give him the shivers. _And I have Colby's gun on me, with no permit or whatever is needed for such things. Not particularly good for keeping under the radar as Colby instructed._

The man with the hard case apparently had the same idea, for he too hastily climbed aboard a few passengers after Charlie, settled himself into a vacant seat behind, and pulled the blanket over himself, tacitly placing a fabric border between him and the rest of the world.

Charlie frowned; something wasn't quite right. Something was just that little bit _off_ about the man's behavior. What was it? Charlie couldn't tell.

 _Listen to me; I'm sounding like Don. As if I could see into a man's mind just by the way he behaves. No, I can predict what he'll do based on mathematical probabilities, but thinking something is odd is Don's ballpark._ But Charlie couldn't help but feel the man's eyes boring deep into the mathematician's back through the bus seat, though every time Charlie glanced backward, the man's eyes were closed, grabbing a short nap while he could. _Maybe he's just thinking that he can use me to show that other people kept their carry-on's also._

The bus tried to lull Charlie into his own nap, the jolting and tossing back and forth around the curves gradually giving way a smooth highway. Too much stress; Charlie found his own eyes closing, worn out with the sheer terror of their premature descent. Idly, he hoped that Don had notified their father and Amita, so that they wouldn't worry. Surely he had; it would have been one of the first things that he did, especially with the convenience of cell phones. Two quick taps on the number pad, a couple of words exchanged, and the deed was done. Heck, Charlie supposed that he could do the same thing. He had a cell phone, too, didn't he? Nah; Don had called them, Charlie was sure of it, and Charlie needed to conserve the battery on his cell. He might need it, later. The recharger was in his own luggage, still at the crash site and under FAA jurisdiction.

He was jostled awake by his seatmate rising, and Charlie belatedly realized that they'd arrived at their new FAA-approved terminal, for crash survivors only.

Not much to look at. It was an old motel—Charlie couldn't even see the sign with the name of the place in the evening gloom—and the town looked to be only twenty percent larger than Crawford, based on a swift estimate of the establishments he could see far down the road. But it was perfect for the FAA's purposes: keep track of every passenger until everything was accounted for to their satisfaction. Charlie stifled a groan. He'd really like to get back to Los Angeles; he had a couple of lectures to dust off before their delivery date, and one of those classes contained some pretty bright undergrads who'd challenge him at the drop of the proverbial hat. Charlie liked to be challenged, but he also liked to be _right_. Therefore, review of those lectures had a little more urgency than usual, an urgency which his FAA captors—er, _investigators_ —wouldn't share.

Well, perhaps Don would arrive soon, and spring him. That would be good. It would be nice, being related to someone powerful enough to haul him out of this mess. Charlie climbed down out of the bus, stumbling slightly at the overlarge last step, and caught himself. The man with the other hard case carry-on was behind him. Charlie ambled forward, clutching his laptop and feeling the gun swing in its holster under his arm.

Someone rammed something hard into the small of his back, shoving him forward. Charlie turned around to protest—and froze.

It was only a small handgun, easily hidden in the man's hand, but at the moment it looked the size of an ICBM missile to Charlie. The barrel was pointed directly at his mid-section, and at a distance of approximately two point three centimeters, it would be impossible for the man to miss. From the ice-cold expression in the man's eyes, he had no intention of missing.

It was amazing what could be seen in a split second. The barrel, some twelve centimeters in length, was further extended by a silencer which had the same dark metallic sheen as the rest of the handgun. The man held the gun in his left hand, seeming very comfortable with it, leading Charlie to surmise that the man was either left-handed or ambidextrous. There was a three centimeter faded scar over the third knuckle that impeded the trigger action not at all. And, most importantly, the index finger itself was caressing the trigger. The trigger moved backward. Time stood still. Blood rushed in Charlie's ears.

 _Isn't your life supposed to flash before your eyes at a time like this? Where's the vision of Dad, of Don, of Amita and Larry? How about Mom, as she looked before she got sick? At least give me a quadratic equation to leave this life with!_

Click.

* * *

The pilot took his eyes off of the controls long enough to glance at the map that Don had pulled forward from David in the back seat. He nodded. "Know this country," he yelled, to be heard over the roar of the chopper blades whirling above them. "Don't think I'll be able to put this bird down in Crawford. Not enough open space."

"Where can you set down?" It wasn't a surprise to Don. A disappointment, yes, but not a surprise. Colorado was filled with mountains and trees and fresh air, and land had to be cleared and leveled before it could be used for anything more than hunting and fishing and rock climbing.

The pilot consulted the map again. He pointed. "Here. Delta. Little bit bigger. Little bit of an air strip just east of town. I can call ahead, arrange to land there."

Don nodded. It was best he was going to get, given the circumstances. "How far to Crawford from there?" he shouted.

The pilot shrugged, the action saying more than his words. "One, maybe two hours," he guessed.

Too long. Don would touch base with Megan back in L.A., see if she'd found out anything more about the crash, where the FAA had taken the survivors for questioning. It had been a good few hours out of touch while in the chopper, and Don needed the update.

The pilot made a smooth landing, and Don and David hopped out of the cockpit, grabbing the small satchels that they'd brought with them in case of a longer stay than either one thought that they'd need. "Hang out nearby," Don instructed the pilot. "With luck, we'll have our consultant back in the time it takes to drive out and back, and we can ferry us all straight back to L.A."

The pilot nodded laconically. "Works for me," he said. "I'll gas 'er up, and then mosey over to town. You got my cell number? Give a holler at least half an hour out, and I'll have the bird waiting for you. If you're going to be all night, give me another call and tell me if you want me to book you a room."

"You're on." Don dismissed the pilot from his thoughts as David walked up, rental car keys dangling in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other.

"Got an SUV," David said by way of an opening line. "Clerk was nice enough to give me directions to Crawford. Said it shouldn't take us more than an hour to get there."

"Sounds good." Don started walking in the direction that David indicated, toward the rental, pulling out his cell phone and dialing in a number that he knew very well. "Megan? Any word?"

Ah, the miracle of cell phone technology. Megan's voice came in loud and clear, as though she was in the next building instead of a couple of western-sized states over. "Yes, Don. I was able to get through to someone fairly high up in the FAA. Once I was able to convince them that we weren't investigating a terrorist plot, they calmed down. They now know that we have people on board, and that we're looking for them. Unfortunately, the information coming out from the site is sketchy. The cells aren't working too well in that area, and the land lines are being overwhelmed by concerned family members. Early reports say that about half the passengers were killed in the crash; numbers will be forthcoming soon and hopefully before the national media gets them."

A man hopped out of his pick up truck in front of them, shoving a pile of newspapers into a self-serve kiosk. The headlines on the paper were already blaring about the crash. Don was sorry for the newly deceased, but that was not his main interest at the moment. "Where are the survivors?" _Where are my brother and my team member?_

"That's where the question marks are coming from. The wounded have been transported to local facilities for a treat and street, and the more seriously injured were split between Denver and Santa Fe as the two nearest major trauma centers."

"Wonderful." How many hours would it be to either place? For Don was certain that Colby had been transported out, and Charlie would do his best to stay with the agent if he could. Denver and Santa Fe were in opposite directions. "Do we know where Colby went to?"

"Still working on it, Don. The people at the FAA say they have lists, but the lists are on paper and not yet in the hands of anyone beyond the locals. I'll call you when I know something more."

"Yeah," Don said to empty air, glaring at the cell, annoyed that he didn't have more information.

"Call Charlie directly," David suggested. "He'll know, and be able to tell you. I'll bet that dozens of families are calling people right now, making sure that they're all right."

Don nodded. It made sense. Another number on the keypad, another sequence that he could dial in his sleep.

Squirt of canned music. "Please wait until the subscriber you have dialed is reached."

Second squirt of music. "This is Dr. Charles Eppes. Please leave a brief message, and I will return your call."

Don waited for the beep. "Charlie, this is Don. Call me. We're here in Colorado, and we need to know where you are exactly. Call ASAP, Chuck." He closed the small gadget, and shrugged. "We head out toward Crawford, unless you have a better idea. They should have some reasonably accurate information as to where our people are."

David nodded. "Better than doing nothing."

* * *

Several million to one.

For once in his life, Charlie didn't feel compelled to compute the odds of it happening. The man holding the handgun to Charlie's gut pulled the trigger. Charlie tensed, expecting the next moment to be his last. That he would be on the ground, gasping out his final breath. That the Cognitive Emergence Theory, still to be fully deciphered, would have to wait for another mathematician to put his name to it. That thought hurt worst of all.

The gun mis-fired.

Nothing happened. No bullet emerged, speeding at the velocity of one thousand feet per second, assuming that this handgun qualified as a low velocity weapon. Likewise, for such a short distance, the co-efficient of drag could be ignored, as would the effect of flesh upon impact to slow the plunge of the bullet into the various vital organs, each of which would exert its own unique properties to determine the progress of the afore-mentioned projectile.

No impact. No bullet.

Charlie blinked. Several million to one, _one_ being the important word in the phrase. Against all odds, Dr. Charles Eppes was still alive. The handgun had failed. His would-be assassin snarled. Charlie did the most sensible thing that his terrified wits told him to do:

He ran.

* * *

It wasn't hard to tell where the action was. Crawford was small—reminded Don of his Fugitive Recovery days in New Mexico—and anyone who couldn't tell that something big had blown into town wasn't trying very hard. Pretty place, though, when it wasn't covered with FAA agents.

The FAA people had toted in a tent and set it up next to the small building that covered all the necessary town government functions despite its size. The tent was almost bigger than the building itself; no, they'd actually put up a couple of tents, and different activities were going on beneath each canvas covering. The largest was also the most quiet; it didn't take much to recognize the area as a make-shift morgue, with the majority of the bodies bearing ID tags and waiting to be transported to someplace a little more hygienic to await last rites and burial. Someone had also had the sense to string up a series of lights, the cords powering those bulbs snaking along the ground and ready to trip up the unwary.

Not where Don and David were headed for, and Don gave a small prayer of thanks. It so easily could have been Don getting called in to identify the bodies of his brother and his subordinate, lives given in the service of their country. Nothing less than that; Charlie was returning home from a mission for the NSA, and Colby was there to protect him. Both had been on duty. It had only been by the grace of God and very little else that they were both alive.

No, it was the unhappy knot of activity that the pair aimed for, papers shuffling and computers tapping, someone yelling about not getting a good enough signal for the wireless computers to connect with Washington and couldn't someone _please_ cable out a landline?

They approached someone who looked like they were at least nominally in charge, a clip board in hand and directing traffic.

"Excuse me." Don slipped into the man's immediate view.

Didn't help. The pencil tapped. A harried glance, and a finger pointed. "Go talk to Ms. Harris, over there. Wait in line. She can direct you, tell you if your family member has been transported to either a medical facility or a waiting area in Hotchkiss." It was a sympathetic line, delivered by someone with too much to do to offer honest comfort. Not speaking of identifying the dead was as comforting as he could make it.

Normally that would have been the right thing to say, but these were not normal circumstances, as the FAA agent was about to find out. Don produced his shield. "Special Agent Don Eppes, Special Agent David Sinclair. FBI."

The man's face showed a little more interest—but only a little. "Wondered when you folks would get around to us." He glanced around, made certain that none of the 'civilians' were in earshot, or the reporters that were already gathering like vultures, snapping pictures and pretending they weren't in everyone's way. "Our people said to send you right up. There's a hole in one of the jets that looks pretty suspicious. Heard your superiors and mine are already wrangling over who gets top billing on this one, seeing as how terrorists might be involved." He shook his head. "And this far inside America. What's the world coming to?"

Which meant two things to Don and David: one, that the local FBI office was taking its own sweet time in getting here or, more likely, that it was already here and this man didn't know it. Two: the average rescue worker didn't yet know that an FBI agent and his assignment were passengers on this ill-fated flight. Good; the less known, the better. There were already too many unhappy possibilities floating around.

But Don wasn't finished. "First, do you have any information on Colby Granger?"

The man consulted his lists, trying to hunt down the name. "Checking it out. You got something on him?"

Don took refuge in a half-truth. "Let's just say that he's a person of interest." _Putting it mildly. Want to know where his traveling companion is, too._ "You got anything on him?"

The pencil stopped. "Yeah, he was one of the injured. Transported out to…" more checking. "Santa Fe. Not clear, but I think I heard that the University Medical Center was taking in most of 'em over there." The man eyed them. "He one of yours? Or one of _theirs?_ "

"He's a person of interest," Don repeated blandly. "Why? Is there something we should know?"

The man did a quick glance around, to make certain that no one was within earshot. "Mister, I saw that bird. I was in Iraq, the first time, and I saw plenty of planes shot down. I never thought that I'd see it here, in this part of the world." He lowered the clipboard. "Buddy, you head right on up and take a look at what brought down that plane. You got my full cooperation. You _get_ these guys!"

"We'll do that." Don went for the ultra-calm demeanor, the poker face giving nothing away. "You said Santa Fe?"

The man glanced automatically at his clipboard again. "Yeah. That's what it says. I'll warn you, it could be wrong. We've been getting a lot of errors, this time around. Check up at the main tent." He pointed at one of the smaller tents, with several folding tables and chairs set up and a battalion of computers plopped on top. "That's where most of the information is flowing through. You'll want to talk to the FAA guys. Me, I'm just Emergency Response. Local stuff. You want them."

"Thanks." Don led David in the direction that the man had pointed out, going through the introduction phase again upon arrival at the tent.

The man in charge introduced himself. "Bart Maddox, FAA, Investigations."

Don shook his head. "Don Eppes, FBI; David Sinclair. Anything you can tell me?"

Maddox frowned. "Where's Randy?"

"Randy?" Don allowed the question to rise.

"From the local office." Maddox got a little more serious. "Can I see that identification of yours, Mr. Eppes? You're from the FBI?" There was some clear doubt in the air.

Don clued in. "L.A. office, Mr. Maddox. Not the local." He offered his ID once again.

"And what interest does the L.A. office have in this crash, Mr. Eppes?" Suspicion hung heavy.

"I have a couple of people on that flight, Mr. Maddox," Don told him.

Maddox's face cleared. "That explains it, then. Who are they, and how important?"

 _More important than you can guess, but that's just my personal opinion._ "One of my men, and a consultant to our office," Don said, keeping it calm. "Do you have any information on the passengers?"

"I have the passenger list, and I can winnow it down," Maddox offered, now ready to be helpful. "We've identified the living, but we haven't recovered all of the bodies. About six people are still unaccounted for. Two are kids, maybe ran off into the woods, but that probably won't help you."

"I already know that my two people are still alive. I got a quick call from them," Don said. "What I need to know is where they are. Getting them back where we can keep an eye on them is of paramount importance."

Maddox shook his head. "Can't help you there, Agent Eppes. We're handling the dead here, trying to make what identifications we can before we ship the bodies off to Denver and their families. You'll need to head over to Hotchkiss, 'bout forty-five minutes from here, heading north."

"We passed through it getting here." Don tried not to feel exasperated. _So close, so close!_ "My information was that one of my people was injured. Your man in the other tent thought that he might have been taken to Santa Fe, but wasn't sure. Do you have more accurate information?"

Maddox shook his head. "Not under this tent. Maybe in Hotchkiss. In the meantime, I need some information from you. From the FBI," he clarified grimly. He shot a look at David, including him in the discussion. "This is big, gentlemen, and this is going to stay under wraps. What were your people carrying, that someone would want to shoot down an entire plane to get to them?"

Uh-oh. Looks like Colby was right about that surface to ground missile. "At the moment, I don't know," Don said. He decided on honesty for the moment, never mind that the man wouldn't believe him. "There's another agency involved. We were handling security only."

The look on the man's face said that Don had called it just right. Maddox believed them about as much as he did the boy who cried wolf. But Maddox merely nodded, not challenging them, rightly expecting that it wouldn't do any good. "That also explains why I haven't seen the local office people," he said, half under his breath. "You want to head up to the site now?"

Don debated. "How far?"

"'Bout six or seven miles. Fifteen, twenty minutes, little bit of hiking."

Too long. "You got pictures?" That would be just as good, he hoped.

Maddox hesitated, but it was reflex only. "Here." He pulled them over to his laptop, set up on one of the rickety folding tables, and fiddled with the mouse.

A disaster; yes. The pristine part was the trees all around the edges. The plane had arrived in the midst of them, flattening a lot of them and leaving the rest untouched. Rays of afternoon sun filtered through the leaves, and Don could almost smell the scent of pine from the computer screen alone.

The rest showed the true horror of what had happened. There were six dead bodies, all sprawled on the ground in positions that they could never have achieved in life, and that was this first picture. Pieces of metal, torn from the main cabin and wings, glinted in the sunlight, jagged edges sticking up and ready to slice through any nearby flesh of either survivor or rescuer. A pile of dumped out luggage littered the ground from where the cargo hold had been split open by the crash. It was difficult to see how anyone could have survived this catastrophe, and Don blessed the call he'd gotten earlier from Charlie and Colby. Knowing that they were still alive was the only thing that kept unwanted tears from forming. _Huh. Big strong FBI guy, wanting to weep from the misery of it all._

David had seen similar from his time overseas. He zeroed in on the plane itself. "Here," he said, pointing at the screen. Don could hear the anger in David's voice as well, carefully controlled as being an impediment to the situation. "This area, on the wing where the engine ought to be. See the jagged edges? A closer look would be better, but I'll bet that this is where it hit. This is what took them down."

Maddox nodded. "And there's something else you need to see." He flipped over several files, pulling up another set of pictures. These showed two men, one a business type in a gray suit and the other more rumpled looking, as though business attire was not his favorite sort of clothing. The glint of a gun slipped through from underneath one armpit, the handgun still in its holster.

Don recognized them immediately, not from the picture but from Colby's depiction of the circumstances on the plane. "Landers, and his guard."

"Right." Maddox assumed that the FBI knew all about this part of it. "We're not moving those bodies until the two of you clear the crime scene."

"Each one with a bullet to the back of the head?" That's what Charlie had told Colby, but it was nice to have it confirmed by someone other than a math geek.

"Looks like it." Maddox refused to give it his seal of approval. Let someone other than the FAA handle that part of it. Someone, say, like FBI agents from a big office in L.A.

Eppes and Sinclair were going to have to disappoint him. "Sorry. We really are here just for our people. Hotchkiss, you said?"

"Yeah." Maddox looked longingly at the computer screen, clearly wishing that it hadn't happened, or that someone else would arrive to take responsibility for handling this disaster out of his hands. "That's where the survivors were taken, all the ones who weren't injured seriously—"

A shout from the other end of the camp. "Yo, Bart. Call on two! It's important!"

"'Scuse me." Maddox was grateful to have something else to turn to. He picked up the hastily laid phone with a line snaking back into the town building, punching in the flashing light.

Don and David turned to go, looking to get moving. There was a missing consultant to track down, one who didn't have any knowledge of how to avoid an enemy sniper. _Not part of the curriculum at Princeton._

Maddox called to them. "Yo! Eppes! Sinclair!" He motioned them over. "Wait 'til I put this on speaker phone. There; Dobie, can you hear me?"

"Gotcha," came out of the phone. "Can you hear me?"

"Go ahead."

"Like I told Bart, we had a dust up here, 'bout half an hour ago. We're still trying to figure out what happened."

"Get to the point, Dobie. These people don't have time to listen to you jabbering."

"Like I said, we're none of us too clear on what happened. Near as we can figure, somebody was carrying a gun with a silencer on it. Pulled it out, took a shot at some guy."

For Don, the world stopped. "Hurt bad?" _Please, please, don't let him be dead._

"Not too clear," Dobie repeated. "Think the thing mis-fired. The guy he was aiming at took off running, and the guy with the gun went after him."

 _Alive!_ Don started breathing again. "Where are they now?"

"Good question. Like to know that ourselves. We got people out looking for 'em, mostly the local police. We're stretched pretty thin here, trying to take statements from the passengers."

"Tell them to be careful!" Don snapped to attention. "Listen, the man who got shot at; under no circumstances is he to be harmed! Is that clear?"

"He one of us?"

"Yes." Close enough for government work, especially since Don worked for the government and Charlie was coming home from a consulting job for Uncle Sam. "Listen, he's important! Tell your people we need him alive! Shoot at the other clown, especially if he shoots at you, but the first guy's safety is your number one priority!" _Or the world will be out one certified genius, not to mention a member of my family._ "We're heading out there right now. Keep me posted. Anything happens, you call me on the spot. Clear?"

"I'll be waiting for you, Agent Eppes."

Don grabbed David by the arm. "C'mon! You drive; I'll try Charlie again."

"You got it." David was already in motion, heading for the rental.

Don could barely hit the proper buttons on his cell, the two that he needed for speed dial, Charlie's name flashing onto the screen, bright in the dusk of early evening. Where had the day gone? Down behind the mountains, wasted in the worry over both Charlie and Colby. This was a part of history that Don would be just as grateful to forget.

Ring. "Locating the subscriber you have dialed."

Beep. "This is Dr. Charles Eppes. Please leave a brief message, and I will return your call."

"Dammit, Charlie, answer your damn phone." Don slapped it shut, shoved it into his coat pocket, thought better of it. He dialed in another number, this time getting an immediate response despite the uncertainty of the signal strength. "Megan?"

"Don? You find them?"

"Not yet, and it's not looking good." He swiftly filled her in. "Listen, start canvassing the hospitals in both Denver and Santa Fe. Colby ended up in one of those, and we need to hear what he has to say. David and I are heading for Hotchkiss, where Charlie was last seen. I'll keep you posted."

"Want me to come out? Question Colby?"

Don considered. "Good idea. Locate him, and then fly out. He may have more information. He checked out the passengers pretty thoroughly, contacted the air marshal on board. He may have seen something. Keep me up to date at all times." He paused. "Bring him home, Megan. I need to know that at least one of our people is safe." _Even if it can't be the one least equipped to handle someone trying to kill him._ He started to fold the cell closed when it buzzed at him: _Charlie!_

He immediately flipped it back open. "Charlie? Where are you—"

Nope; a text message. _Cant talk. Help._

Crap. Don's fingers were too large to dart quickly over the tiny keyboard. _Where are u._

 _Dont know. Gun._

Don could guess at that part. Charlie was someplace in Hotchkiss, trying to avoid the man with the gun who'd already taken a shot at him. His brother couldn't answer the phone, Don deciphered, because talking would alert the man as to Charlie's position. _Stay put_ , Don laboriously typed in. _Coming._

Hurry.

* * *

Charlie closed his eyes in relief. Don was coming for him, and Don had a gun and the training to use it. Colby's handgun hung heavily against Charlie's side, but Charlie was under no illusions as to his ability to wield it successfully. _I'd be more likely to shoot off my own foot,_ he thought wryly, amazed that he could even think of anything other than panic under these circumstances. _Target practice is one thing. Shooting at something with eyes sounds a little bit harder._

Now all he had to do was to stay put, and avoid the man who was trying to kill him. Not too much doubt that there was someone after him; having a trigger pulled in the general vicinity of one's belly tended to make that crystal clear. That Eminex person and his guard may have been killed, but either that was a separate coincidence or they had been mistaken for Colby and himself. Either way, Charlie was in trouble and he needed to hide until Don arrived to bail him out. _Still keeping up the old ways, aren't we, brother mine? Me running away from bullies, you finding them and beating the crap out of them._

Something snapped; someone stepped on a twig, bit back what was clearly a curse. Another language, sounded kind of Middle Eastern, but clearly a curse. Charlie froze. The man was nearby, and he was looking in the shadows where Charlie was hiding. Charlie had chosen this road at random, something that looked dark and easy to lose himself in, and obviously the man had figured out the same thing.

Getting closer. Run, or keep hiding? Running meant the man could shoot at him again, and Charlie put the odds of the gun mis-firing again at something like five to four. And with the way Charlie's luck was running, more likely the man had gotten another gun, one that wasn't as likely to malfunction. But hiding had similar drawbacks; once found, the man could strangle Charlie with his bare hands, and do it much more quietly. Charlie wasn't exactly a ninety pound weakling, but the man after him was much more likely to have trained in some form of fighting. The outcome would be almost a certainty.

Except for one other thing: Colby's gun. Charlie pulled it out from the holster under his coat, his hands shaking. The man didn't know that Charlie had it, didn't know that Charlie was prepared to defend himself with more than his fists. That Charlie had more on the ball than a security-laced laptop. He wasn't an expert with guns, but Don had taught him the basics. And Charlie was about to put those basics into action. _Damn, it felt different! It felt different thinking about killing a man, not just aiming at a paper target. How do you do this, brother mine?_

The night had gotten more than dark; the stars provided a meager amount of light, just enough to barely see the shape creeping toward him, checking each bush for signs of a wayward mathematician. Charlie squinted, trying to make the blob come clear. Which hand held the assassin's gun? Did the right look slightly longer than the left? No, that couldn't be right. Charlie remembered the man holding the gun in his left. _When the gun is two centimeters from your gut, it's a little hard to miss._

It could be street bum, looking for a half empty bottle. The way his nerves were, it could even be a dog, sniffing around the bushes.

The man looked up, and Charlie saw his eyes, cold and black as the surrounding night. It was those eyes that he had seen before, with a gun pointed straight at him. It was him. It was the killer. The killer grinned, and raised his weapon.

Colby's gun roared in Charlie's hand before he knew what he'd done, the sound echoing off of the buildings around them. The killer yelled something but Charlie was too scared to try to figure out what it was, or even what language it was in.

Charlie ran.

It was only later that he realized that he hadn't the first clue if he'd hit the man or not. The one thing he did figure out was that he'd dropped the gun along with Colby's holster.

He hoped that Colby didn't want either of them back.

* * *

It was the chief of police that met Don and David as soon as the pair arrived at the motel that the FAA had commandeered for their investigations. Despite the fact that it was closing in on ten at night, people were still milling around, many of them passengers, all eager to get the ordeal over and done with so that they could return home and shake with the delayed reaction for a while. Several of them had already popped prescription drugs for stress relief; others had had to make do with carefully marking the location of the local bar, intending to obliterate the scene in their minds with not so carefully measured quantities of alcohol as soon as the Powers That Be had finished with them for the night.

Police Chief Roy Jenkins didn't wait for David to turn the engine off on the SUV before approaching the vehicle. Clearly he'd been waiting for the pair of FBI agents, and he had something in his hands: a gun, with a shoulder holster. An unpleasant sensation grew in Don's middle. That could only mean something not good had happened.

Introductions went swiftly. "We found these over by the Feed store," Jenkins said, handing them over. "They mean anything to you?"

With the initials C.G. engraved onto the holster? That smooth, worn leather that Colby had worked with until he could pull out his gun faster you could say _Boise, Idaho?_ Yeah, it meant something. Don sniffed at the handgun. A faint sulfur smell remained, indicating that it had been fired recently.

"They belong to my man," Don said flatly. No need to give this police chief the whole scenario. There was only one way that it could have gotten here, and that was if Colby had made Charlie take it, which meant that Colby was afraid that something like this might happen. And 'my man' could cover a whole range of possibilities, including 'it's my little math geek brother who's in this mess and who's going to get himself killed if we don't find him.' For all this police chief needed to know, it could be Colby himself running out there, trying to escape from an assassin. The police chief didn't need to know the details. All he needed to know was that the man out there who had dropped this gun was wanted alive by the FBI. Emphasis on 'alive'.

Except Colby wouldn't have dropped his gun and holster. Only geek types did that, as witness what Chief Jenkins had in his hands. And Colby would have sought out the proper authorities, taken precautions for getting help out here, gone into hiding with protection until the mess could get itself cleaned up. Don almost wished that it had been Charlie that had ended up getting air-lifted to Denver or Santa Fe or where ever the FBI agent had been taken for medical care. At least they'd known where the man was, that he was alive.

Don felt himself settle into his tracking mode, letting his feelings simmer into an icy mix of cunning and stealth. This was what he'd cut his proverbial FBI teeth on: Fugitive Tracking. Hunting down people who were trying to stay one step ahead of the law. He was after a math geek, and the fact that an assassin was also after the math geek made it all the easier. Two for the price of one. And the fact that it was his brother made it easier still: he _knew_ how the man would think. How he would react.

All Don had to do was to follow the trail.

And pray to get there first.

* * *

With almost a sob, Charlie dropped into the ditch that was surrounded by bushes, praying that it would be enough to hide him from the killer. He had heard the man running behind him, had doubled and then tripled his speed in his terror to get away, blessing the countless miles that he'd put in hiking and exercising. He wasn't out of shape, he knew that, but there was a big difference between being in shape and being in shape to _kill._

But it had taken a toll; Charlie was all in, ready to drop. And so he did, into this ditch, hoping that the cover would be enough to prevent the killer from seeing where he'd gone until Charlie had recovered his strength enough for another mad dash ahead of a bullet. _Gonna try to outrun a bullet, Professor Eppes? Even you should know better._

Okay, physical feats of derring do were out of the question. Charlie knew that to be a fact. What assets did he have? He had his brains, and for the moment that was about it. Time to take stock of things. One: he was safe, for the moment. He couldn't hear the killer anywhere, which meant that he'd outrun him and that the man would have to slow his pace in order to track where his quarry had gone. How long would it take for the killer to find him? Charlie regretted the lack of concrete data that would allow him to apply the appropriate theorem and determine the approximate length of time that he could rest here in this spot. All the math in the world wouldn't help in the absence of data. Okay, make the best supposition: Charlie decided to give himself fifteen minutes. If the killer hadn't shown up by then, Charlie would move out, present a moving target.

What other assets did he have? He had the laptop. No, that should be classified as something to be protected, not something to use in self-defense. It contained high level information, still to be worked on despite what he had led Colby to think, and was under some heavy duty protection that only Charlie could decipher. But what one man could encode, another man could de-code, and Charlie was under no delusions that a code, no matter how complex, couldn't be broken. And since one way to break it was to break Charlie himself…Charlie shied away from that thought. Okay, best to keep the laptop as safe as Charlie himself.

What other assets? Aha! He had his cell, and—wonders of wonders—it still had a charge. Not much of one, granted, but enough to put through a call to Big Brother. Now if only there was a tower close enough for service…yes! One bar. Far from perfect, but good enough. Charlie flipped the top open, looking guiltily around thinking that the light from the screen might alert his pursuer.

No, nothing. Charlie still appeared to be safe. But, to be careful, he kept the screen as low as possible and close to his chest, hoping that the killer wouldn't see anything even if he was approaching Charlie's location.

Next: call Don. Sound tended to carry out here in the wilderness and might alert his pursuer, so text messaging would be the way Charlie would go. Slower than speech and more awkward but safer, and right now safety was pretty high up on the priority list.

The screen notified him that he had six messages: two from students that Charlie had already decided to give time extensions to because of his out of town excursion and resultant inability to provide the extra help that he'd promised them and the other four from Don. He could pretty much guess what those were: various versions of _Charlie, where are you?_ Charlie sighed. He'd like to know his own location as well. Right now, and Charlie looked around himself again, automatically, Charlie would very much like to know himself where he was. At the moment, lost in the middle of the woods pretty much covered it. Not only that, Charlie realized, he hadn't a clue as to which way he'd fled after escaping from the killer.

Message: Don, help. That would be enough to get his brother's attention. Now, crouch down and wait for a response, closing the screen so that it wouldn't glow in the dark.

He was right. It took only seconds for an answer to come back: _Where r u?_

More tapping. _Dont know. Outside of town._

Direction?

Again: _dont know._ Charlie wished for an apostrophe, decided that it really didn't matter.

Another return message: _stay put._ Charlie could even imagine the sigh that accompanied it from his brother. _Gotta rescue your little geeky brother from the big bad bully again, Don?_

Cripes, that killer's eyes even reminded him of that bully in the seventh grade, what was his name? Francis, something or other? The kid had hated his given name, insisted on being called Check, short for Matuchek which was his last name. Check had taken an instant dislike to Charlie, even more since he couldn't routinely get to him when Don was present. Don wasn't the biggest kid around but everyone knew not to mess with him. Don was the one who was breaking all kinds of records on the baseball diamond even at that age, and he had a _reputation_ , one that Charlie envied. No one pushed Don around.

Which was another reason that Charlie had tried to hang around his older brother: simple self-preservation. His mom and dad hadn't said much when Charlie came home with a black eye and scrapes the time that Don had had to stay after school for some make-up test he'd missed, and neither had Don, but something had happened with both his parents and with Don and Check had left Charlie alone for almost two weeks, glowering at him from the corner of every class that they had together. And then Check had made up for it after that, making sure to hit Charlie every place that it wouldn't show. Even that hadn't been the worst part. The worst had been the looks from the other kids, the ones that said, _that's what you get for trying to be in a class you're not old enough for. Go back to the little kids, dweeb. Don't stand out. Don't make us look bad, geek. You deserved what you got, geek. We're on Check's side. You don't belong here._

Charlie hadn't found too many places that he did belong, but CalSci was one of them and he truly wished that he was there at the present time. Then he'd be out of this mess, and wouldn't need to call for help from his big brother. He sighed again, and settled himself down to wait.

* * *

It wasn't a sigh from his big brother, it was a shout. "David! It's Charlie! Get on the phone to Megan, see if we can track the signal from his cell!"

"On it." David wasted no time. "Chief Jenkins, I need a landline."

"You got it, mister. Come this way."

Don finished tapping in the last message: _stay put._ He stared at the screen, wondering if Charlie would try to put in any additional information as to his whereabouts, decided that his brother didn't have additional information to give. _Stay put, Chuck, so I can find you._

Police Chief Jenkins had put his entire department at Don's disposal, and Don used what he needed. Right now the best evidence was at the scene where Colby's holster and gun had been found, and Don had them put up all three spot lights that the department possessed—the fourth was unusable until the replacement light bulb came in—and was examining the site for clues.

There wasn't much to find. There were several bushes, one of which looked crunched under the weight of a man—this was where Charlie had tried to hide, Don deciphered. Yes, foot prints, the size of his brother's foot. A spent bullet casing here, three feet away. It too smelled faintly of sulfur, the same as Colby's gun. Don felt his blood run cold. Charlie had fired Colby's gun, right here, trying to defend himself.

"Another casing, over here," David called.

"Bag it," Don ordered, wishing for a Forensics Lab with L.A.'s capabilities. He turned to Chief Jenkins. "How much can you—"

"We send everything up to the County office," Jenkins interrupted, knowing exactly what Don was going to ask. "We're not big enough to need anything." _Except when something like this drops out of the sky,_ was the unvoiced additional comment.

Don nodded. He was used to this. Not quite the same countryside, but the same types of things that he was used to. Little technology, lots of seat of the pants flying. Somehow, it made him feel more in control. "Keep to the chain of evidence protocols," he requested, "and send it to County for identification. Copy the info to my office in L.A. We may need it later, for the trial." Assuming there would be a trial. These are terrorists, accustomed to turning themselves into martyrs. _Not at my brother's expense, guy!_

He hunched down to look more closely at the sites, looking for more evidence, waiting for the technology to tell him where his brother was. His brother had evidently taken off in a hurry— _wouldn't you, with bullets flying?_ —for the foot prints were widely spaced. Charlie had also been heavily laden, the laptop clearly weighing him down despite the minimal amount of additional poundage. The blanket that the FAA people had given him had floated over to the next bush. Don examined it, found a bullet hole through one corner. He felt sick; that could have been Charlie. But there was no blood, nothing to indicate that the bullet had gone through his brother on its way to puncturing the fabric of the blanket.

Don looked at the direction: east, toward the trees. Smart move, especially for a panic-stricken math geek. The trees would slow people down, would allow the man to dodge bullets, allow those bullets to lodge themselves in trees instead of an arm or a leg or a chest cavity. Of course, it was also straight away from town and help, but what was done was done. Charlie had done the best that he could.

There was a second set of prints, these with a shoe size larger than Charlie's, and Don surmised that they belonged to the killer. These prints weren't spaced quite so far apart; the pursuer was going at a slower pace, realizing that he couldn't keep up with Charlie. But he would have a good idea of which way to go, and was undoubtedly still on the hunt.

There wasn't any time to waste. Don made a decision. "David, stick around here for another few," he instructed. "Wait for Megan to call back with the cell tower info."

"You got it. You?"

"I'm heading off after Charlie." Don indicated the direction that both sets of foot prints showed.

"Alone?" David's tone of voice clearly demonstrated his concern.

"I need you here, for when Megan calls back with coordinates," Don told him. "We can't wait."

David pursed his lips, but accepted the necessity. He lowered his voice. "How about someone from the police department?"

Don scanned the possibilities. All but one that he could see was overweight and mildly out of shape. No need to keep to such niceties here in Small Town, USA. The crime rate was low and the major occupation of the police force was to hand out traffic violations. And, Don reminded himself, there was always the chance that one of them was also on a terrorist payroll. There wouldn't be an opportunity to run any of them through the various data bases for warning signals. No, better to handle this himself.

David came up with the same conclusion independently. "I'll head out to your location as soon as I hear back from Megan. Be careful, Don."

* * *

 _Stay put._ Those were Don's instructions, and Charlie had every intention of carrying them out. He would stay right where he was, despite the howling of the coyotes nearby, despite the hooting of the owls hunting for mice, despite the bugs crawling over his arms, despite the snap of the twigs suggesting that the killer was—

 _Crap!_ The killer was getting closer! Eyes now well-adjusted to the dark, Charlie could see almost clearly the outline of the man, picking his way through the underbrush, nosing aside branches with an arm made longer by the handgun held firmly. And the man was headed right this way, right toward Charlie's hiding place.

Rapid fire assessment: the killer would be on him within the next one hundred twenty seconds. Don was at least six hundred seconds away and more likely farther than that. Six hundred minus one hundred twenty was four hundred eighty— _oh, hell._ Charlie broke, and ran.

* * *

"Shots fired!" Don snarled that into his cell at David on a dead run. "Shots fired! Get out here! Two miles due east of town!"

"On it. Bringing the SUV."

Don caught a quick roar of the SUV's engine turning over as David's own cell broke the connection and blessed the agent's foresight in getting a vehicle that wouldn't rip out the undercarriage on a dirt road. David would be here in moments, and Don would either hop on board or be so far into the underbrush that nothing short of a pack of hounds would be able to follow. Either way, back up was on its way.

Shots fired. Don had heard two, and they hadn't come from Charlie because his brother no longer had Colby's weapon. That meant that someone was shooting at his brother. Yeah, there was always the possibility that there was some hunter out there searching for deer, but this late at night the majority of sport hunters were at home guzzling beer. Don didn't need Charlie to calculate that the odds of the sounds of bullets flying was strongly in favor of someone trying to kill his brother. Don lengthened his stride. He'd always been a good sprinter, could be counted on for a stolen base or two, and he used that burst of speed to best advantage.

But he was running to nowhere. The gunfire stopped, and there was no longer any sound to guide him. "Charlie!" he yelled. "Charlie!"

No one answered. Two possibilities: one, Charlie was hiding, and the killer almost upon him so that Charlie couldn't make a sound. Second: Charlie might be—no, Don wouldn't give that thought even the courtesy of thinking it. It couldn't happen. It _hadn't_ happened. Don wouldn't let it.

He had good night vision, and he used it. Tracking mode: he sniffed the air, catching the acrid sulfur scent of a recently fired weapon. If there was nothing better to guide him, he'd use that.

Don advanced.

* * *

 _Run!_

For the second time that night, Charlie forced tired legs into a sprint, only slowing when his legs started to stumble beneath him. The laptop, still slung over his shoulder, slapped awkwardly against him, digging a widening bruise into his ribs with every step. _How to evade a bullet?_ Charlie dodged at the crack of the first one. _So that's what it sounds like zipping past your ear. I shall have to tell Larry._

I shall have to stay alive in order to tell Larry.

Dodging kept him from being punctured by the first bullet, so Charlie was more than happy to try it for the second. However, the first time he'd zigged right, so this time, to keep things on an even keel, he zagged left.

Mistake. On his left the ground took a sharp downward plunge, a steep embankment that he hadn't been able to see in the dark.

Charlie just barely managed to keep from yelling as he toppled over and rolled down to the bottom. How the laptop stayed with him, he'd never know, but it stuck to him and dug into his rib cage with every roll, smacking against small rocks and larger boulders until he cascaded to a halt at the bottom.

No time to stop and count broken bones. Anything damaged would have to wait for a more opportune time. There was still a killer after him, and Don's admonition to stay put no longer applied. Charlie needed a way out, and he needed it now.

And there it was: a train ambling along at a relatively slow speed. Charlie had no idea why it was going slowly instead of speeding across the mountainous terrain but at the moment it didn't matter. Charlie didn't even take time to count his blessings. He jumped. He clung.

He escaped.

* * *

The forest had settled down to quiet once again. Don slipped forward among the trees as quietly as the mouse near his foot, edging his way forward, eyes straining to see movement.

There was nothing, nothing but the eldritch smell of a recently fired weapon. In the absence of anything further, Don pulled out his flash to piece together what had happened.

Footprints, larger than Charlie's, walking this way. Spent shell casing, one. Must have been the first shot. Follow the trail of foot prints to a thicket of bushes, push into the bushes to see crushed branches. Don read the scene like a story out of a book; this was where Charlie had hidden himself, trying to 'stay put' as Don had told him to. The ground was cooling, but showed evidence of his brother's recent tenure here. Leaves were ground into the dirt where Charlie's feet had been. There was even a long and fat line on the ground that puzzled him until he recalled that Charlie was still toting his laptop; the line matched the approximate width of the canvas case. The small rodents of the night were beginning to edge back in along with the insect life, suggesting that it hadn't been long, as if Don couldn't tell from the recent gunfire.

Need to follow the pair. Don cast around, saw more footprints beyond a small scattering of stones too hard to hold their own prints. These were more likely to be Charlie's, smaller than the first set that had led to the copse of bushes and spaced farther apart, his brother dashing frantically into the night, trying to avoid the bullets headed his way. Don savagely tamped down his emotions; they'd only get in the way and right now Don couldn't afford the distraction.

Speed was also a priority. Don started jogging, able to follow the footprints with only minor difficulty, playing the flash along the ground to target the footprints, both large and small.

"Don? Don?"

"Over here," he called to David. "I've got tracks."

David caught up with him, guided by the sound of Don's voice, Don slowed by the necessity of hunting for trail clues. "Right where the cell phone towers said he would be," David told him. "Looks like we were too late."

"Yeah. The other guy found him first. Megan called back with the cell location?"

"She did. She pulled Amita and Larry into headquarters, going to pull an all-nighter with them. Her flight to Denver and Colby doesn't leave until tomorrow morning."

"She couldn't get an earlier one? We need Colby's intel."

"Yeah, but it would have routed her through Chicago and not gotten her to Denver any sooner. Figured this was better. Want me to arrange for the Denver office to question Colby instead? They can get there faster."

Don considered, not an easy task while hustling along a forest trail no wider than a plank of wood. "It can wait. Nothing he knows will impact what we're doing tonight, and the FAA is probably itching for a crack at him. Hey, wait a minute." He stopped on a dime, a glint in the scant moonlight alerting him. He bent, picked up the piece that he'd noticed, and frowned. "The second casing. I heard two shots. This must be from the second one."

Neither one said anything to that, but both were thinking the same thing: did the killer not need a third? They both picked up the pace.

Then the trail went cold. Don cast around for more foot prints, but could only find those of the larger killer. Charlie's prints had vanished.

"Over here," David called.

More trail notes: bushes torn out of the ground, scrapes of raw earth shining forth. A body had rolled down this slope. More ice in Don's gut; it could have been a dead body rolled deliberately down this slope. It could have been an injured body rolling down this slope, the gunshot wound preventing the body from stopping or even slowing his descent. No time to wait; Don plunged down the slope, David in his wake.

But there was nothing there to find.

* * *

Okay, this was a first. Charlie had to admit, he'd never been in the cargo area of a train, dirty and disheveled, bruised and sore and thankful to be alive. The train picked up speed, carrying him further and further into the night, taking him farther away from Don. _Taking me away from the killer,_ Charlie thought to himself. _That's a good thing._

This was a half-empty car, and dusty. Charlie sneezed, and the laptop banged against sore ribs. He winced. For the first time in his life, Charlie wished that he could simply chuck the thing away. Not that he would; no, the NSA would have his hide if he did such a foolish thing, and besides, it would only mean more work for Charlie. The first half of the grades for the Advanced Diff EQ class was in there, and retrieving the data would mean pouring through the paper exams to recreate the information. No, at the moment Charlie would hang onto his toy.

He sneezed again. There were crates on both side of the large car, one set stenciled with German lettering and the other proudly proclaiming the contents to be the finest in outdoor clothing for the hiking enthusiast. And that was it. No table, no chairs, no convenient hammock to sleep in for the night—Charlie suddenly realized just how tired he was. He glanced at his cell phone, mildly surprised that it too had survived the last hour. Just after ten, which corresponded with the darkness around him. Sleep beckoned, but there was one more thing to be accomplished before propping himself against those crates for the night.

At least he didn't have to be concerned about talking, about the noise alerting his pursuer. He flipped the cell open, and keyed in the speed dial.

Don answered almost immediately. "Charlie! You're alive! Where are you?"

Which was when Charlie realized that he didn't know. That, in fact, he didn't even know which direction the train was headed in. "Good question," he replied dryly. "Don, I tried to stay put, like you said, but that guy with the gun—"

"Yeah, yeah, I know that part, Charlie," Don interrupted over the phone. "I was five minutes too late. Where are you? Are you okay?" The last came out as a demand.

"I'm not really sure. Like I said—"

 _"Where are you?"_

"I'm on a train," Charlie told him, too tired to take offense. One of the crates was sticking into his rib cage, right into a bruise, but at the moment he didn't really care. "This guy was shooting at me. Math professors don't get shot at; did you know that, Don? I fell down a hill, and he was still coming after me, and this train was going right in front of me, so I jumped on and got away."

Charlie could hear Don working to maintain his cool. This was not the time to lose control. "Where is the train going?"

"Like I said, I don't know. I was a little busy to look for the conductor," Charlie told him, suppressing a yawn. "I'm not even sure that this train has a conductor. I know for certain that it doesn't have seats. Just a bunch of crates." The next yawn was tougher to beat down.

"All right, we can figure this out. David is already on the phone with Megan in L.A. We can do the same thing we did a few minutes ago; we're going to track you by the cell phone signal. Just keep talking to me, buddy. Give me a good signal to work with. We've got Amita and Larry working on it, too. Keep talking to me."

Charlie tried to oblige. "I thought Larry had an exam to prepare; does he have time for this? Last year's set of exams got stolen, so he had to create a new one. He swore up and down that he was going to make this one so easy that no one would bother trying to steal it."

In spite of himself, Don snickered. "I should have had professors like Larry. Would have done a lot for my GPA."

"You didn't do so bad," Charlie reminded him, surprising Don. Another yawn, notifying Don of just how exhausted by the events his brother was. _Hard work, getting shot down and then shot at._ "You made the honor roll almost every semester."

"I didn't think you noticed."

Charlie grinned, not caring that Don couldn't see it. "I'll be honest; at the time, I didn't. I was too caught up with trying to fit in at Princeton, and screwing it up royally. One of the drawbacks to being a genius: you're under-age for all the good stuff. I'll bet you liked college a lot better than I did. For a change, you didn't have to put up with me. I still had Mom, grounding me whenever I tried to sneak into the Rathskeller for beer."

"Got me there, buddy," Don had to admit. "I felt like one of the guys, once I got there. Do you know how many people would try to go through me to get to you in high school? There were times that I felt like your appendage."

"I kept wishing that you'd let some of 'em. The pretty ones, Don."

"Charlie, they were all older than you."

"Didn't matter, Don. How about Patty, that blonde in my biology—"

"Got your position, buddy," Don interrupted. "Way to go, professor. You're headed north by north east, toward Denver, on a cargo train due in at twelve fifty six."

"About two hours," Charlie realized by checking the time on his cell. "You'll be there to meet me?"

"Shortly thereafter," Don assured him. "David and I will get back to our own chopper and take off from there. I'll call you again with an ETA. Wait at the Denver train station; better yet, call me when you get there. And don't go anywhere! We'll pick you up there. Just keep a low profile, buddy, and we'll come get you."

* * *

"He's okay," Don reported unnecessarily to David, closing up his cell. "He sounds like crap, but he's okay."

David too closed his cell, ending his own call. "I alerted our chopper pilot. He's got his bird gassed up and ready to go; he'll be waiting for us in Delta. I estimate it'll take us about half an hour to get to Delta—assuming no wrong turns in the dark—and the pilot thinks another two, two and a half hours into Denver. He's already charting the flight plan, arranging for a landing site at Denver International."

"Let's hustle," Don agreed, swinging into a fast jog, David beside him. "You drive, and I'll call ahead to the Denver office, have them ready with a car and a driver to get across town."

"You don't want to have them waiting for Charlie as the train gets in? They could be there in seconds."

Don was silent for a moment. "No."

"No?"

"No." Another long pause. The rental came into view. "This whole situation is putting an itch on my back."

"Talk it out." David hit the unlock button. The rental chirped at them, and David swung in behind the wheel. "What's bugging you?"

"This whole thing," Don complained over the roar of the engine turning over. "There are too many coincidences."

"Keep talking." David swerved to avoid a pot hole in the dark.

"That Landers guy, getting whacked on the plane. Who took him out? You saw the photos from the crash, David. That was a professional hit. One shot to the back of the head, same for his guard. It had to have happened in the confusion, probably by the guys sitting behind them on the plane. What does that say to you?"

"I'm driving in the dark with deer ready to leap out at me. That's taking up all of my attention. Tell me what it says to me, Don."

"It says that there was a hell of a lot of planning; very high class planning. I can see getting someone on the same flight, but to arrange the seats like that? That's not coincidence, David," Don said. "That speaks to some well-placed individuals getting involved." He paused. "Can you imagine the self-control those killers had? To kill, while expecting to die in the crash? To make sure that they take out their target, so that he doesn't survive that same crash? That speaks to a hell of a lot of training, David."

"I can get behind that." David actually got behind a large truck as he pulled onto the highway, and the sentiment was equally as sincere. The dark made it easy to pull around the slower moving vehicle; headlights signaled the approach of oncoming traffic, telling him when it was safe to pass on the left on the single lane road. "But Landers is big business, not terrorist stuff. FBI business, sure, but a different case. A federal case, with a federal witness. Connect it to Charlie. Or even Colby, if by some outside chance someone was out to get him and not Charlie."

"No, it was Charlie," Don responded. "They're after Charlie. Somebody tried to hit him after the plane went down and they discovered that he was still alive." More thoughts whirled. "How did they know that he was still alive? He could have been one of those killed." A shiver went up his spine. It had been so close.

Still was. Someone had found out that his brother had survived, and was out to remedy that situation.

"We need more data," he thought out loud, hoping that David would chime in with what he needed. "Fact: someone is after Charlie. Fact: he was headed home after completing a task for the NSA on a national security issue."

"Conclusion," David put in, "is: someone wants the information in Charlie's head not to go anywhere else."

"But why?" Don asked. "The job was over. Charlie finished what he was doing for the NSA. Didn't he?" He trailed off, thinking furiously. "What if he hadn't? What if the NSA _thought_ that he had, thought that he'd done whatever it was that he needed to do, didn't realize that there was more?" More thinking. "The NSA does a lot of work with codes, with intelligence. They get a piece of code, so complex that their regular guys ask for their favorite on-call genius. Charlie comes out, gives them what they ask for, and goes home."

"And—?" David swerved to avoid a skunk, eyes glaring at him in the glint of the headlights. He sped up slightly, trying to make best time.

"So either Charlie has more than the NSA thinks he has, or Charlie is taking work home with him to work on some more, and the NSA is hoping that no one will notice. Yeah, I'm liking that scenario more," Don decided. He put his hand against the dash, bracing himself as David took the curve a little too fast. "If Charlie starts cutting his classes, somebody will notice and realize that the NSA has more than someone bargained for. This way, sending Charlie back incognito, back to his day job, suggests that the NSA is clueless and the terrorists are free to continue to plot until the right moment for our people to capture them." Don sat back, flabbergasted. "David, this is big."

"And Charlie's right in the middle of it," David agreed, white teeth flashing in the dark. The smile was not pleasant. "You think he knows?"

"I don't see how he can't," Don replied. "I mean, he has to know. He cracked the code for them, and told them that there was more to it. He hands them what he can, and they send him home. After all, he has a bodyguard with him: Colby. Nobody is supposed to know what he's working on. Nobody would suspect. He keeps on going with his normal routine, solving the puzzle, and then the NSA shows up on his doorstep at the proper time to take possession of whatever it is."  
"It would also explain why he ran," David mused. He braked briefly to avoid something non-descript crossing the road.

"Aside from the guy shooting at him," Don said, trying to keep the sarcasm from getting too heavy.

"Well, yeah, but Charlie was already jumpy. Why would he have been looking for Landers and his bodyguard to have been shot? Was he expecting something to happen? Sounds like he might have been." He pulled into the airstrip. The chopper pilot was waiting for them, and the landing field already had its lights on, illuminating the area almost as brightly as day.

"What say we go ask him," Don said, "before the killer does?"

* * *

It was going to be a long train ride, made longer by the lack of passenger seating. Every position that Charlie tried managed to rub up against one bruise or another and if it didn't, then it was pounding in a new bruise by the time the train rounded another corner and jostled him and the crates into yet another unique predicament. Charlie sighed, and settled for a general feeling of mild and chronic discomfort as the best he could hope for. Getting into Denver at almost midnight, Don had said? Couldn't come too soon.

No, the best he could hope for—and was expecting—was that he would arrive safely at the train station in Denver and that Don would come and pick him up. Then they could all head home to L.A. where Charlie could pick up the pieces of the rest of his life. He could go back to being a mild-mannered math professor, with the occasional odd consultancy job on the side.

Not quite. _Sigh._ There was still the NSA's little puzzle. He hadn't told Colby—in fact, he'd been clearly instructed not to discuss it with anyone outside of the people in that tiny little conference room—but the part that he'd accomplished had only been a part of the puzzle. And yes, it was big. Majorly big. Big as in nuclear weapon big, with the illegal acquisition of materials for constructing the afore-mentioned weapon forming a large portion of the undeciphered code. Charlie had been able to de-code a hefty chunk of it, enough to send some very highly placed intelligence types scurrying to the highly placed policy-making types, but there was still that last piece yet to be put into comprehensible format. It was the opinion of his employers that the rest of the information would represent a desirable lead as to the location of the nuclear material but it wasn't anything that the policy-makers needed, so Dr. Eppes was released to go home in the company of his FBI bodyguard to continue working on the problem in the comfort of his home where the government wouldn't have to pay for two expensive Washington hotel rooms. When he figured it out the rest of the missive, he could notify his employers and send the intelligence on with no one in the terrorist community the wiser. Field operatives would take the intelligence and put it to good use.

Dr. Eppes could go home. It would, they told him, throw the terrorists off their stride. It would tell the intelligence people of all organizations, operating here in this country legally and illegally, that the codes had been completely de-coded and that the information was already being processed in several different fashions. The terrorists wouldn't bother Dr. Eppes. Actually, sending him home would make Dr. Eppes safer. The terrorists weren't stupid; they would know that having some of their recruits study with Dr. Eppes would improve their own ability to create unbreakable codes, so they would want him home and teaching where they could enroll in his classes. Learn from your enemies, that was their credo. You can't learn from him if he's dead. Dr. Eppes was safe.

Right. Just about now there seemed to be a fundamental flaw in that thinking, as evidenced by the various bruises on his body and by his current location in a cargo train headed back the way he'd come, toward Denver. Charlie snorted. He couldn't even be certain that it was Denver, only that Denver was what Don had told him based on tracking of his cell phone signal. He glanced down at the window of the device: still two bars of power. Good. He'd be able to notify Don when he'd gotten safely into Denver, and find out how long it would take before Don could come pick him up. Don would have his own travel arrangements made by then.

He sighed. _Still asking you for help with the bullies, aren't I, brother mine?_ The bullies might be a little different, a little more numerous and they've learned different tactics, but still bullies. _You'd think I'd have grown up by now, learned to fight my own battles. Not a problem when the battlefield is a classroom or a scholarly journal, but outside of the Ivory Tower?_

Sigh.

Ouch. Charlie moved again, trying and hoping to avoid more bruises.

Then he perked up; the train was slowing. The whistle hooted. Charlie chanced a look out through the crack in the sliding cargo doors, saw signs of civilization: street lights, highways with trucks rumbling along as fast as the train, houses growing in size as they neared their destination. He glanced at the time on his cell; yes, almost midnight, Mountain Time. The train was coming in on time. Just a little while longer and the cavalry would be coming over the proverbial hill.

Okay, low profile. Charlie was reasonably certain that getting caught bumming a ride was not what train officials wanted, nor did he think that it fit Don's concept of low profile, so removing himself from the vicinity of this train and into the passenger area of the terminal took on a higher priority.

The train rumbled into the station, heading slowly toward the cargo area where some crates would be lifted off and others dumped on to take their place. Charlie poked his head out. Yes, close enough to walk into the passenger area and slow enough that he could jump off without breaking something valuable, and he wasn't referring to his laptop. He positioned himself carefully, legs dangling from the floor of the train car, and leaped. He landed on his feet, jarring every bone in his abused body, but kept his footing. He looked around.

Too many lights. Charlie hunched his shoulders, tried to keep the laptop from swinging around, tried to look like every other railway worker in the area.

It must have worked; Charlie sauntered oh-so-casually into the waiting room and looked around. It was large, larger than the Frasier Auditorium at CalSci where many of the freshman lectures were given. There were benches, hard ones with wooden slats and metal braces, but they looked marginally more comfortable than his previous accommodations. There was a large clock that had to be greater than two meters in diameter high on the wall, telling him that it was just after midnight. What were all these people doing here at this hour? It wasn't crowded by any means but there were more prospective passengers than Charlie would have thought would be here at just after midnight.

Hungry; Charlie belatedly realized that he hadn't eaten anything since the ill-fated plane was in the air, and even that was only a few stale peanuts and a very small bottle of water. The FAA folks had told them that something would be provided once they got to the FAA's impromptu headquarters but that was before someone started taking pot shots at him. Charlie hadn't waited to find out what the soup de jour was for the evening.

Not that the station boasted food of any higher quality. Charlie had a choice of brightly colored candy in non-natural shades of red, cookies that approached a ten on the geological scale of hardness, and little pseudo-cakes with green icing that looked more like mold than icing. There was even an apple, but the worm that was waving frantically at him from right around the stem dissuaded him from that possibility. Charlie finally settled on a hermetically sealed bottle of fruit juice, deciding that acquiring both calories and fluid would be the optimal strategy at the moment. Even airport food was better than this, and Charlie devoutly hoped that they could make a brief stop before the last leg of his journey.

Time to check in. Still two bars of energy on the cell; Charlie could afford the battery life. He flipped open the tech-toy and keyed in the speed dial.

"This is Special Agent Don Eppes. Please leave a message—"

Charlie tuned out the rest of the greeting. He'd heard it before, on many occasions, knew that it meant that his brother was en route to Denver—yes, the train station did boast several maps of Denver, and he really was here—and that his brother was in an area where there wasn't any cell service. He left a brief message telling Don that he'd arrived safely, and closed up the cell. He settled down on a bench to try to make his bottle of juice last long enough to fool his stomach into thinking that it was a hefty appetizer.

His stomach was smarter than that, and let him know it in no uncertain terms. Back to the vending machines to decide which of the well-preserved candies were the least deadly.

Afterward, Charlie would never know what made him turn around at that particular moment. But he did, and he saw four people with dark complexions. He saw them, and they saw him. Their eyes met. Their mouths tightened.

No theory was needed at the moment to determine the eventual outcome of this meeting. Charlie froze for all of half a second. It was enough time for each of the four to pull out a handgun. Two of them yelled something incomprehensible, and Charlie didn't bother trying to figure out what it was. 'Die, infidel dog!' was a reasonable working hypothesis, which meant that Charlie's location had been discovered yet again.

Charlie fled. The sound of gunfire lent speed to his heels.

* * *

There were entirely too many official type people around the train station. Don's gut tightened, and he hurried in, David in his wake. _What the hell was going on?_

The chopper had landed at Denver International; the controllers had very kindly made a space for them over toward the private side of the airport. A taxi had taken care of the rest. Charlie hadn't answered his cell, but that hadn't unduly worried Don. By now it was one AM, and, knowing Charlie, the cell's battery had probably died. Don had gotten the voice mail message from Charlie that his brother had made it into Denver just fine and was waiting for Don and David at the station.

But this didn't look good. Yellow police tape cordoned off the area, police not letting irate prospective passengers in. Don muscled his way up to the tape.

A man in plain clothes and a hard face stopped him. "Sorry, sir. This is a crime scene. No one allowed in."

Don held up his badge. "Special Agent Eppes, FBI. This is Sinclair."

The plain clothes man frowned. The trust was not flowing. "I don't know you. You're not FBI. I know all of our guys. Who are you?"

"I'm from the L.A. office." This was not sounding good. "You are—?"

"Special Agent Baxter. What's L.A. doing here?" _Out of territory,_ was the non-verbal part of the question.

"I expected to meet someone here," Don started to explain.

The Denver agent put two and two together. "Jeezus, that's the answer."

"What?" Don didn't like what he saw.

"Somebody decided to shoot up the place, not one hour ago. Actually, four shooters; some of the witnesses said that they were aiming for some guy in a suit and accidentally took out the train station instead."

"Anyone killed?" Don was grateful to David for asking that question. He wasn't certain that his own voice was still working at that moment. "Hurt?"

"Three people got hit. Nobody killed, although one man is in critical condition. They took him to Bethamy Medical Center; he's in surgery right now."

"You get names?" David asked immediately. "Who's the one in critical condition?"

"What's your interest?" Baxter recollected himself. "Let me see your badges again. We've been getting some reporter types, trying to impersonate federal agents for a story."

Don and David wasted no time identifying themselves a second time, this time more thoroughly. "We're looking for a man by the name of Charles Eppes," David told Baxter, tucking his badge back into his pocket. "Is he one of the injured?" Urgently.

Baxter shook his head, and Don felt the cold icicle stabbing his gut melt just a little. Baxter cocked his head. "What's this Eppes guy done?"

 _What has he done? He's disappeared again, just like we were kids. I kept telling him to wait for me, after school, and I'd walk him home so that the bullies wouldn't pick on him. But he never would. He'd just keep on running, trying to do it on his own, trying to avoid them. Trying to avoid me. Trying to get me in trouble again._

But David keep the conversation flowing. "He's one of ours," he said easily, still tense with worry. "A consultant, and one who is in over his head. We need to find him, fast. He here?" figuring that by now the FBI had everyone present identified.

Baxter frowned. "Charles Eppes?" Another frown. "Are you talking about the Dr. Charles Eppes who's up for a Rutherford Award?"

"You've heard of him?" Don couldn't help it; it just came out. There weren't many people outside of academia and high level research who kept tabs on the scientific geniuses of the day.

Baxter gave a small smile. "Yeah. Did a double major in math, along with criminal justice. Thought I'd do a paper on the Eppes Convergence, just to show my professor that I was better than he thought, and that I deserved an A in his course." Another small grin. "I got lost less than half way in. I settled for a B plus." Back to business, carefully casual: "what's a college professor doing here in a train station?"

But Don's little red flags were waving in the non-existent breeze, sending up _warning, Will Robinson_ signals like semaphores. "Let's just call him a person of interest," he said easily. "We want him back, and we want him in one piece." Especially the head part. Better keep that intact. The NSA would be mighty unhappy if that didn't work as advertised.

"All right." But Baxter wasn't about to let go. "Then why was this train station the target of a bunch of gunmen yelling, 'Death to the infidels' and 'Praise be to Allah' and a few other phrases that we still need to translate? I'm going to need an answer to that question, Special Agent Eppes. He may be an L.A. consultant, but this is a Denver train station and in my backyard. I happen to like keeping my backyard clean." Then he realized the name that he'd uttered. "Eppes? Any relation to Charles?"

Don dodged the question. "My office was handling the security detail," he offered instead. "When we heard that the plane went down, we headed out here." He tossed out a bone of information, one that wouldn't cost him anything. "I've got a man in one of your hospitals here, an agent named Colby Granger. You can check that out, if you want bona fides."

"I will, Special Agent Eppes." The suspicion was still uppermost.

"Then you can understand why I can't share any more details with you, Special Agent Baxter."

Another frown. "No, I'm afraid I can't, Special Agent Eppes. This has something to do with the plane crash a couple of hours from here? And now either Middle Eastern terrorists or people impersonating terrorists are shooting up a train station? Just what the hell is going on? Why is a passenger from that flight on the run from the FAA? And what is your relationship to Charles Eppes, Special Agent Eppes? A cousin, perhaps?"

Damn. "Brother." _And, no, this is not a private search on Company time._ "As I said, Baxter, he was doing some consulting for one of our government agencies, and I'm not at liberty to say which one. Since we've worked together on several occasions, Washington asked us to provide the security back and forth across the country."

"And as you can see," David slid in, "it was needed. There is evidence suggesting that the plane Dr. Eppes was flying on was brought down intentionally."

Baxter lifted his eyebrows. "I can see that we're going to have to coordinate with the FAA on this one," he said. "Wait here, gentlemen. I'll be right back. Don't go anywhere," he added. The suspicion was still uppermost. Don could almost hear the thoughts running through Special Agent Baxter's head: _are these really FBI agents from L.A.? Gonna check them out real good before letting them go. Our enemies are a little too talented at forging ID's._ "Hey, Ben," Baxter called to a cop in uniform before he walked away. "Keep an eye on our friends here, will ya?"

"Sure thing, guy."

And, to be honest, Don couldn't blame the agent. If the tables had been reversed, he knew, he'd be asking the same questions and running the same background checks on the out of towners. But there really wasn't time for this. Charlie was somewhere out there in the night, maybe even dead and dying, and Don needed to find him _now_.

And then there was the other question. Don kept his voice down. "David, how did they know where to find Charlie?"

"Don?"

"How did they get four guys here in this train station, waving guns, trying to take him out?" Don managed to quell the cold shiver running up and down his spine, but it was a near thing. "I mean, look at it, David. We have a pretty small window of time to work with. Charlie jumps the train about ten o'clock, and gets into Denver at midnight. He's here all of fifteen minutes at the outside, and four guys crash the joint. Tell me someone spotted him and got four gunmen on site in under fifteen minutes."

David sucked in his breath. "When you put it that way…"

"Yeah. Not real fun." Don glanced at the uniform who was trying to look as though he wasn't listening in. Don turned away so that even his lips couldn't be read. "Got any ideas?"

"Not ones I like to contemplate."

"I'm not looking for nightmare material either, but Charlie's life is at stake. I'm thinking that someone knew that Charlie was getting into Denver on the twelve oh two cargo express. You?"

"Seems reasonable, Don. How?"

"I'm thinking that it might have been the same way we found out: triangulation of the cell phone signal."

"Or someone tapping directly in on Charlie's phone," David suggested grimly.

Don nodded. Either explanation would account for the evidence. "In both cases, we're talking a well-placed mole in the communications network, or someone with some very fancy and expensive gear."

"Which goes along with something very big, something with some heavy duty national implications." David trailed off, thinking. "Don, I don't like this."

"Neither do I."

"What do we do about it?"

Don frowned. "We don't contact Charlie by phone. After we warn him," he added. He glanced at the uniform, still watching them. "Time me," he ordered. "Give me ten seconds. They shouldn't be able to trace him effectively in that amount of time." He opened up his cell, hoping that there might be a message from Charlie but not surprised when there was no little signal envelope in the cell window. Watching David for the count down, he hit the speed dial.

Charlie answered, live and in person and ragged around the edges. "Don—"

"Charlie, listen to me," Don interrupted.

Ten. Nine.

"Your phone is being tapped. Leave the area immediately to avoid being traced."

Six. Five.

"When you have left the area—"

Four. Three.

"—call me on a landline."

Two. One.

"Don?"

Zero. Minus one.

"Do it, Charlie. _Now_."

Minus two. Minus three.

Click. Buzz. Charlie disconnected the call, and Don listened to the harsh noise a moment longer, feeling helpless. He had just severed that last, tenuous connection to Charlie. Don had no idea where Charlie was, what shape he was in, or anything at all.   
His brother was on his own.

* * *

Charlie stared at his cell. There was a tiny picture of Amita on the display, so small that he could barely recognize her features but he knew that it was her. He'd put the picture there, fighting with the electronics that refused to behave the way the user-unfriendly instructions had said that they should. But he'd persevered, and the picture was there.

No. Don had been very clear. Charlie's phone was being tapped, and using it was probably what had brought the gunmen to the train station. He'd barely made it out of there alive and in one piece. _It's amazing what a little fear can do, not to mention a few dozen bullets whizzing past your head. Helps you dodge between train cars a lot faster._

And once again, Charlie hadn't a clue as to where he was. All he knew was that he'd rushed headlong out of the train station proper, ending up back where he'd started among the freight trains. One was just starting off, chugging heavily and picking up speed. Charlie had flung himself at the ladder to one side of an open bed, grabbing onto the rungs with the desperation of a cornered rat and swung himself and the laptop onto the cargo bed and out of reach of the gunmen. The sound of the bullets and shouting receded into the background, and Charlie slumped to the hard floor of the freight car, panting.

Afterward, Charlie would never realize how long he sat there, trying to get his breath and his frazzled wits under control. Don told him later that it had been nearly ninety minutes, but even then it didn't sink in. The only thing that Charlie could understand was that they—whoever 'they' were—were still after him.

And Don's terse call had reassured him not at all. Charlie berated himself; he should have known that his pursuers could trace him. How often had he watched Don and his team do the same thing, with David or Colby sitting in front of a bank of electronics, waiting for enough seconds to pass so as to locate the suspect? Why had Charlie thought that the killers couldn't do the same thing?

Don's message had been a wake up call. If he didn't realize it before, Charlie knew it now: someone was out to kill him. And he had no illusions that it had nothing to do with his work for the NSA, which meant that they—whoever 'they' were—were after his laptop as well. Much good would it do them; Charlie defied any but a handful of top experts around the world to break through the security codes he'd put onto the little machine.

Charlie mentally shook himself. He'd won himself a short breathing space. How short, he couldn't tell. Hah—he couldn't even tell which direction he was headed. It was dark, about two AM— _damn, I'm exhausted!_ —and with no sun in the sky he hadn't the first inkling of where the train was headed.

No help for it. Charlie would need to go on the offensive, take the initiative to avoid being traced by the killers. It should be do-able, he told himself. He'd watched Don and his team trace people, even suggested methods for doing it. Surely he could put that knowledge to good use. Don had already told him the first piece: no cell phone use. It would be too easy to trace him yet again by triangulating the signal. Don had also told him to leave the area where the last call had been made. _No problem, brother mine; this train is doing just that. I estimate I'm leaving the area at about sixty miles per hour._

There was nothing that Charlie could do at the moment, nothing to be done until the train came to a stop. Then he could get off of the train, find a pay phone, and call Don. The killers wouldn't be looking for a landline. Charlie would be safe for a little while, hopefully long enough for Don to come get him.

Hmm. Why should Charlie wait for a rescue? He could simply stop in at the nearest car rental, sign his life away, and drive either to L.A. or to where ever Don was. Someone on the move was much more difficult to trace than a stationary person. He'd learned that much from Don and the others. Yeah, that sounded good. He could rest until the train stopped, hopefully at a reasonable hour and in a reasonably sized town, and then calmly make his way back home. He wouldn't even need Don to come get him, like when Don got his driver's license at sixteen and was parading it around, picking thirteen year old Charlie up after school and stuff.

Yeah, that would work. He settled himself down against the crates in the freight car, resigning himself to a brand new collection of bruises.

The rental would be a luxury sedan, with _very_ comfortable seats, and he would charge the expense to the NSA. After all, they got him into this!

* * *

The sign in the hospital lobby had instructed all personnel, visitors and staff alike, to turn off their cell phones. Don chose to ignore that sign. When Charlie called from where ever he was, Don would take the call and nobody was going to stop him.

But at the moment, he had a witness to interview. Sure, it was three AM, but it was three AM Mountain Time, and it was only two AM back in L.A. That one hour made a lot of difference to his state of alertness. And his brother was somewhere out there with a bunch of killers after him. That too tended to help him just a tad more awake.

If he couldn't find Charlie, then he could certainly work on who those killers were. Take out the killers, and Charlie would be safe. Same principle as when they were kids: take out the bullies, and his little brother could walk home unmolested, which meant that Don didn't have to watch the little guy hanging around the ball park where Don was at practice. _You ever realize how pathetic you looked back then, Chuck? Little kid brother trailing after the older boys?_

I'll bet you don't even remember that dork Mickey Donnelly. Great first base, killer home run hitter when he could get the bat on the ball, used to taunt you until you'd run away to home. Of course, then you got caught a couple of times by the bullies, so I got you to wait behind the bleachers where old dork-wad wouldn't see you. It was either that, or leave practice early, 'cause Mom and Dad got really pissed when you came home all beat up. It helped when Coach made you the team statistician. Then Mickey Donnelly shut up for a little bit. Didn't like what your numbers told him. Figure he would've been one of your bullies if he wasn't on the team.

Don shut the memory down. It wasn't useful at the moment, would only distract him from the job at hand.

The job at hand was Colby Granger. Don had identified himself and David at the front desk, finding it to be a lot easier than the Denver train station to get through, and had been escorted by the security guards up to Colby's room. David exchanged a look with Don: _this is a security guard?  This is a donut-eating machine and a heart attack waiting to happen. Should we get a real guard, in case the killers come after Colby?_

Don considered. The potential was small. The killers weren't after Colby, they were after Charlie. They wouldn't bother with Colby unless they thought that he could identify them, not very likely since Don was willing to bet that the Denver four hadn't been on the flight that Charlie and Colby had taken. Terrorists reveled in anonymity, and Colby hadn't seen these new ones. He was safe, although 'safe' and 'hospital' were two words that deserved reconsideration when used in the same sentence.

Three AM, but Colby wasn't asleep even though his eyes were closed. Don and David eased themselves into the room, grateful that the other bed in the room was empty. There was a multi-legged coat hanger affair hanging over the bed with a boxy electronic marvel more complex than the entire bank of FBI computers feeding fluid in through a plastic hose into a hole in Colby's arm surrounded by a small bruise. The other arm looked mummified by several miles of white bandages marred only by some red stuff leaking through. Four stitches topped off a shiner that would have the agent wincing for days every time he looked in his mirror, and Don could smell the new plastic from the tubing decorating Colby's face from four feet away.

Colby stirred, quiet though Don and David had been. He opened his eyes, blinked. "Don?"

"Hey, guy." Don seated himself at the bedside. "You okay, man?"

Another blink. "Where's Charlie?" Starting to panic, starting to try to struggle up out of his bed.

"It's okay, Colby. It's okay." Don wasn't quite certain what he could touch. He settled for the uninjured shoulder, gently pushing the man back onto the pillow. "We're on it." _Which means that we haven't found Charlie yet. Gonna slip that by you?_

The push wasn't needed. Colby exhausted his strength in milliseconds. The lines in his face deepened from mere crevasses to massive ravines. "Gotta protect Charlie. They're out to get him."

Don watched his team member. Colby's pupils were large enough to drive Charlie's train through, heavy with pain-killing narcotics that weren't quite doing the job. How coherent would the man be? He leaned over. "Who, Colby? Who's out to get him?"

"Not sure, Don." Colby tried mightily to focus on his team leader despite the drugs. "Too many loose ends on that flight. Too many loose ends." His eyelids were clearly heavier than five hundred pound barbells. They drifted shut, only to have Colby try to open them once again.

"Tell me about the loose ends," Don urged. "What were they?"

"Too many guns on that bird," was Colby's sleepy reply. "There was mine, there was a guy guarding that CFO from the news, and there was the air marshal. Too many guns. Shouldn't have that many guns on a domestic flight."

David exchanged a glance with Don. "Shouldn't have that many guns on an international flight, either," he murmured.

Don moved on. "What happened, Colby? What happened when the plane went down?"

"Shot down," Colby said as promptly as he could. "Plane was shot down, Don. Recognized the sound."

"Yeah." Don remembered that first frantic call on Charlie's cell, Colby getting on and sounding half out of his mind. "You said it sounded like some sort of rocket launcher. You still think that?"

"Yeah." The narcotics were making Colby's thoughts fuzzy but his memories of the noise remained crystal clear. "Yeah. The whoosh. You got like half a second for it to register in your gut, then you feel the bird jerk like a hawk grabbed hold of it, then you start going down. The whoosh was there. We got shot down."

Another glance between Don and David, and it wasn't hard to imagine what passed between them: _someone here in the continental states has access to military grade bird-poaching equipment?_ This really was big. _And my brother is caught up in the middle of it. Geez, Chuck, when you attract bullies, you really do it right, don't you?_

There was more intel to be gained. Don kept his voice gentle. "You talked about that CFO…" he cast around for the name.

"Landers," David supplied from behind him.

Don accepted the help. "Landers, and his guard. You said they were shot. Execution style."

"Didn't see it," Colby mumbled. "Charlie looked." _And my brother didn't throw up? He's been hanging around me too long._ "One shot each to the back of the head. Pretty clear, he said." _Yeah. That's what we saw, too, when we wasted all that time at the crash sight, trying to find you and Charlie._ "He okay?"

"We're working on it," Don told him. "Colby, try to remember, back on the plane. Where were the two of you sitting?"

"Don?" The change of subject clearly confused the injured man. He blinked, trying to stay coherent.

"You had seats in first class," Don nudged gently.

"Yeah. NSA paid for 'em. Not gonna turn down something like that." Colby paused. "Didn't watch the movie, Don. Some stupid chick flick, but all those guns had me antsy."

 _I know they did, Colby. You're a good man. I was right to send you with my brother._ "Who was sitting behind you?"

"Don?"

"Think back to the plane," Don urged, keeping his sense of urgency in check with a tight leash. "You had seats Two A and B, the window and the aisle."

"Yeah. Wanted Charlie at the window, where anyone walking down the aisle had to go through me to get to him."

Standard procedure. "Right. Who was sitting behind you?" Also standard procedure, and Don knew that Colby would have looked them over carefully.

Colby paused to think, eyes closed, long enough that Don was beginning to think that the narcotics had finally kicked in. "Two dudes, one of 'em so small that at first I thought it might be a woman. Small dude: five foot three, maybe four. Dark hair, light skin, dark brown eyes, slender but in good shape. Had some muscle on him once you looked close, under a tee shirt and khakis. Taller dude: average height of about five ten, black straight hair, dark eyes that kept scanning all around him, bad skin, wearing a business suit and carrying something that looked like a laptop case but wasn't. Too much of a bulge in the middle. I figured he just had a change of clothes in there, wanted to fly without having to worry about luggage in cargo. They both spoke English, and I think they did some French. Just small talk."

"Any Arabic? Farsi?" David couldn't help but ask.

"No. Nothing like that." Colby was certain. "I would have freaked, and changed our flight on the spot. Charlie's mission was over, but you can't be too careful." He was drifting off.

Don wouldn't let him; not quite yet. "Tell me about the guns, Colby."

"Guns." Colby had to struggle to think. "Yeah. There was mine—I gave it to Charlie. He's okay, right? Didn't shoot off his own foot?" Colby tried to grab Don's arm in alarm.

"Your gun is safe," Don temporized. _It's in my possession. I'll give it back to you once it's no longer needed as evidence._ He tried another tack. "Talk to me, Colby. Tell me about the plane going down. You heard the missile. You felt the plane rock."

"Yeah." Colby was losing ground fast. He gave up on the eyelids, concentrated on making the mouth form the words. "The plane gave this big jerk, and tilted to the left. Almost got doused with a bottle of water flyin' through the air. Guy across the way got soaked. Flight attendant ended up in his lap, her skirt up to here." Even thoroughly blitzed on drugs, Colby's lips still curved upward with the memory. "Scared stiff, dude. Plane was going down, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it. Made Charlie shove his laptop under the seat. My luck, it would've clocked me good, jumping into the air once we hit." He trailed off.

"Going down," Don prompted gently.

"Yeah." Colby struggled to regain his train of thought. "You know how everything seems to move in slow motion? That the seconds stretch out? Happening' here, man. Couldn't hear anything, but saw it all. Grabbed Charlie's seatbelt, yanked it tight. Double-checked that my own gun was secure; didn't want it going off when we hit and nailing me through the ribs. Watched a bunch of bags of peanuts go spraying all around, hit some guy in the face as he was exiting the john. Don't think he got back to his seat before we hit. He was beyond where we were sitting, couldn't see him any more. Little busy, right about then."

Don could tell that whatever he squeezed out of Colby in the next sixty seconds was all that he was going to get. He leaned forward, aimed for Colby's ear. "Did you hear any gunshots?"

"Gunshots? No, Don. I know those two in back got it, but I gotta be honest; I didn't hear it. They weren't gunning for Charlie, and I had enough… to worry… about."

Almost under. "Any gunshot nearby?"

"No." In a mumble.

Don tried one last time. "Colby, they dug a bullet out of your arm. You were shot. Didn't you feel it?"

"Shot?" Righteous indignation warred with sleep, roused the man momentarily. "When? All I felt was the plane hitting the side of the mountain, and something breaking up inside. You're telling me I got shot? That it wasn't the damn plane?"

"Yes, Colby." Don made sure that got into the FBI agent's ear. Where it went from there, he couldn't tell. "You were shot. Probably by the guys sitting behind you. The seat cushions were burned in the crash so we can't prove it yet, but that's the working scenario."

"Charlie get shot? No, that's right, he's okay. Pulled me out of the wreck. Good guy. Watching my ass." Colby suddenly opened his eyes, pupils still blown. "You sure, Don? I was shot?"

"Keeping the bullet as evidence," Don assured him.

Colby blinked. "Well, crap."

Don had to grin at that. "Go to sleep, Colby. We'll get the bastards that did this."

Didn't have to tell Colby twice. The eyes closed for the final time. "You do that, Don. Countin' on you."

 _Counting on me. Yeah, and so's Charlie. It's been two hours, Chuck. Call, already._

* * *

Six AM. Charlie glanced at his cell for the third time in as many minutes, wishing that it was later. That he'd gotten further along on his journey. That he could use his cell for something more than an expensive timepiece.

Not fair. He _could_ use the cell—as a video game, at least as long as the battery held out. Somehow Charlie didn't think that would be a productive use of his resources. But Don was right: somehow someone had tracked him through the cell towers, just as the FBI did, which meant that there were some well-placed people who wanted Charlie dead. Calling on the cell would be a quick means to helping them accomplish their ends, and that was something that Charlie really didn't want to see happen.

No, Charlie needed to find his way out of this mess without alerting those killers. He'd gotten several hours of badly needed sleep on the freight train, hiding out among the crates of washing machine parts that were being transported from here to there. Charlie still hadn't figured out where he was, but that was unimportant for the moment. If he didn't know where he was, chances were that his pursuers were equally in the dark.

Six AM. The train had slowed, probably ready to chug into whatever city was along the tracks, and needed to wait for a clear track. Charlie took advantage of the lull to jump from the slowly moving car, rolling on the ground to break his fall. _Hey, I needed a few more dead leaves and dirt to complete my look._ He tried to brush himself off as much as possible, giving it up as a bad job after only a few minutes.

He looked around. Trees, trees, and more trees. Oh, wait, there was a bush. With thorns. How appropriate. The only sign of civilization was the train tracks, his previous mode of transportation still huffing its way to the train station. Charlie sighed. It looked to be a long walk, but at least he could walk instead of trying to outrun a bullet.

Once in town, he could look around for a car rental place and get moving toward L.A. And he could find a pay phone with which to call Don who had to be frantic by now. And maybe he should call his father, too, and Amita. Both of them also knew the circumstances, knew the flight that Charlie had been coming home on. Had Don been allowed to tell them that Charlie was okay? Not a given; the ways of national security were frequently a mystery to the average citizen. Yeah, calling them would be a good idea.

But in order to do that, Charlie needed to find a pay phone. Which meant hoofing it into town. He looked around once again, hoping to see someplace closer that he could walk to. Then he realized that it didn't matter. It was six AM, and car rental places likely wouldn't open until eight.

Okay, food. Breakfast. Surely there was an all-night diner somewhere, some place that would take his credit card. Charlie's stomach rumbled in agreement. And diners tended to have pay phones.

Plan: decided on. Next step: implementation. Charlie set off, following the train tracks, intending to walk into town unless he found a better solution en route.

* * *

Six AM. Don looked at his watch, double-checked the time on his cell. Where the hell was Charlie? His brother should have called in by now. How hard was it to find a landline?

David was having the same concerns. "What if he doesn't call?"

"He'll call."

Thankfully, David didn't challenge that assertion. He did, however, move on to other options. "We ought to see what other avenues we can explore, Don. Let's think about them; you play Devil's Advocate. How about putting in an APB with the police, get local help?"

"Too easy for the killers to tap into."

"That's suggesting that our enemies have a lot of fingers in a lot of pies."

"Didn't expect them to be able to trace my call to Charlie, either," Don returned grimly. "We need to avoid anything that will give them equal help toward finding him. And that includes all kinds of electronic tapping." He paused. "In fact, when Charlie calls me on a landline—" _when, not if_ —"when Charlie calls, give me a thirty second window. No longer than thirty seconds, and I'll tell Charlie to change his location again. Just to be safe."

David nodded, unable to disagree with Don's thinking. "But that doesn't get _us_ any closer to him." He thought a moment longer. "Let's go back to the Denver station." He cocked his head. "Okay, I'm Charlie. I'm tired, and scared. I just hopped off of a freight train, I sit down on a bench, and I call my brother who tells me to sit still. Somebody comes in and starts shooting up the place, aiming at me. Where do I go?"

"Fastest way out of there," Don replied immediately, then stopped to think. "And that would be—?"

"Not out the front door." David had seen the station, as had Don. "That's the way that the gunmen came in."

"Back door?"

"Several 'back doors', all leading to loading docks. Only one or two passenger areas, and those all have turnstiles."

"Which means that they would be harder to get through, and would take more time." Don began to get excited. "Plus, the chances of a passenger train being in the station at that time, at a little after midnight, aren't very great."

"Which means that Charlie would head toward another freight train," David concluded.

"Which makes sense, because it's a known quantity," Don added. "Charlie had been in that area, he knew what it looked like, it was his best chance to run through and not get caught by the gunmen. And that suggests that he hopped another train," he finished triumphantly.

David agreed. "Let's see which trains were in the station at the time of the shooting."

Don broke it down a little further. "Let's see which trains were _leaving_ the station at the time of the shooting."

* * *

Nine AM, Mountain time, and the world was looking a lot brighter for a certain professor of mathematics.

Breakfast: greasy, but filling. Charlie had limped into town at approximately seven forty-five, having twisted his ankle stumbling over the tracks and slipping on the pebbles used to make the ground more secure for those tracks, and had headed straight for the nearest eatery that he could spot. Grateful that his credit card still worked, he wolfed down whatever would arrive fastest, and used the diner rest room to remove the worst of his travel excesses. There wasn't anything he could do about the rips in his shirt and pants, and he didn't try. Even the clothing stores wouldn't open until at least ten, and Charlie wasn't at all certain that he wanted to hang around for that part of the cleaning up process. Staying a moving target instead of a stationary one had a certain appeal for the moment.

Who would have thought that the diner wouldn't have a working pay phone? Both of the little kiosks were labeled _out of order_ , with pieces of dirty masking tape over the coin slot to make sure that the message got through for the illiterate and the desperate.

Don would have to wait a little longer for his call, insisting that his brother not use the cell phone that he still carried in his back pocket. Charlie finished eating, continually looking around for anyone who looked like they were carrying a gun and looking for him, keeping his back to the wall and facing the entrance. Watching the door seemed to help his digestion. Keeping a low profile also seemed to be in his best interests. He paid for the meal quickly and quietly, leaving a twenty percent tip on the receipt, slipping his credit card back into his wallet. Thank goodness that he hadn't lost his wallet in the confusion. He'd need his driver's license to be able to rent a car.

That was his next stop: there was a car rental place located in a small storefront with a half dozen vehicles in the parking lot. Little signs cordoned off the parking slots for those vehicles. Charlie eyed them, mentally selected the upper end Caddy as just compensation for all the misery he'd been through in the last twenty four hours.

Charlie sauntered in. The rental clerk too was inhaling the liquid caffeine, trying to make himself wake up, trying to prop his eyelids open. Charlie suppressed a grin; the clerk looked almost exactly like the students in his four hundred level class that he taught every Tuesday and Thursday, at eight in the morning. The timing had been deliberate; only those truly dedicated to math had the willpower to forego sleep on a regular basis. The dilettantes backed out and hustled over to their computers to do the grunt work for them.

The clerk looked up, shielded his eyes from the sunlight streaming in through the front window. "Can I help you." Not a question, and just barely civil, considering the hour. Simply the expected phrase, over and done with. Initiate the transaction, complete it so that the clerk could return to his bored contemplation of his inner eyelids.

Charlie obliged him. He too wished to get it over and done with, and asking too many questions would give his pursuers more time to catch up with him. "Need to rent a car."

As if there was anything else to be accomplished at a car rental agency. The clerk nodded, continuing with the script. "Economy, mid-size luxury, SUV, mini-van, luxury—"

"That one," Charlie interrupted. "Luxury." _I'm sore, and it's all the NSA's fault._

"Rates are one hundred twenty two per day—"

That much? "I'll take it." The NSA would be paying for it, or finding themselves some other over-priced math professor.

"Bringing it back here."

"Yes," Charlie lied. Surely someone semi-official could return it to this little whistle stop after Charlie had caught up with Don. How far away was Denver? Charlie was clueless. He didn't even know the name of this little town.

"How long."

"Pardon?"

"How long do you want it for," the clerk added, still no question mark at the end of the bored comment. Obviously Charlie was still following the usual script for walk in customers.

"Three days," Charlie lied again. It seemed like a reasonable period of time.

"Driver's license." The clerk held out his hand, by which Charlie deciphered that the clerk was asking to see the document.

He was right. The clerk made a copy of the license and handed it back. "Credit card." That got run through the computer, the box emitting the typical electronic dialing sequence and the clerk entering the mysterious array of numbers that would allow the transaction to go forward, the details etched into the memory banks of several data bases.

"You want insurance. Nineteen ninety nine."

Unknown killers after him. Unable to contact his FBI big brother. Hadn't a clue which were main roads leading east, west, or straight up into the air. "Yeah. I'll take it."

"Initial here. And here. And here. And here."

The ordeal was finally completed, and Charlie was once again feeling exhausted and sore by the time the key was in his hand. The couple of hours of pseudo-sleep that he'd gotten on the freight train hadn't been nearly enough, and the grease-laden food from the diner was resolutely refusing the digestive process, sitting heavily somewhere west of Providence, Rhode Island.

There was still more to be accomplished before he could set out. Charlie turned back to the clerk. "Do you have any maps of this area?"

"Huh?"

Egads, an honest question mark. Clearly Charlie had ruffled the clerk's feathers. "A map," he repeated, wondering if he was still speaking English. "I'm not from around here."

The clerk blinked. "Where do you want to get to? I'll MapQuest it for you."

Charlie thought fast. "Denver."

The clerk grunted. He hunched over the keyboard. "Gimme the address."

Now what? "Don't know the address," Charlie improvised. "I have directions once I get to Denver. What's the best road that way?" And how far is it?

Another blink, followed by a sigh. The clerk tapped onto the keyboard and handed the results to Charlie. "You know, there's GPS in the car. You can use that."

 _Oh. Right._ Charlie accepted the papers and forced down a dismayed yelp. Six hours? How had he gotten six hours from Denver in one short train trip? Well, maybe it hadn't been that short, maybe he'd lost track of time while sleeping, but still! Six hours? He turned it into a sigh, and moved on to his last request. "Know where there's a pay phone around here?"

"Diner."

"Out of order." Charlie made his responses as laconic as the clerk's.

The clerk considered. "Gas station."

"Thanks." Charlie made his escape.

* * *

"Six possibilities, Don." David dropped the spread sheet onto the table, showing the departure times of the freight trains from the Denver station. The pair had taken up temporary residence in the Denver office, hiding out in a conference room since all the offices were already occupied with agents trying very hard to track down the loose threads to the airliner crash before the high-powered Washington FBI agents with attitudes waltzed in. Preliminary Forensics had confirmed Colby's report: a surface to air missile had taken out a passenger plane, and that little detail had more than one upper level personage upset. More work was needed to identify the exact make and model of the missile, and it was underway with all haste. That didn't matter to Don and David; they wanted Charlie back. And while knowing that terrorists had been after the plane, identifying those responsible needed to take a back seat to retrieving one FBI/NSA consultant. David ran his finger over the dried ink. "These all left between eleven fifty PM and one in the morning. The report said that the gunmen took out the station at approximately twelve fifteen. I'm erring on the side of caution, in case one of the earlier trains left late, and Charlie hopped onto that one."

Don nodded. It made sense. "How do we narrow them down?"

David pointed. "My vote goes for one of these two. Both left just after the shooting, twelve thirty and twelve thirty six respectively, both headed west which is the way that Charlie would want to go, to get home to L.A."

Don frowned. What David had said sounded right on the surface, but all of his instincts were shouting, _'no, no, NO!'_

Fugitive Recovery. It had been several years since Don had done it, but not all of his skills were gone. There was a reason why he was disagreeing with David; he just had to figure out why. He stared at the numbers on the spread sheet in front of him, wishing that his brother was here to interpret the numbers for him. _Of course, if you were here in front of me, Chuck, I wouldn't be going through this dance._

Numbers. Don eyed each one, each departure time from the Denver station. There were the two headed west, toward L.A. and San Francisco, both through Las Vegas before splitting apart to head to opposite ends of the state of California. There was one headed east, to Wichita before striking off to points closer to the Mississippi. That one had left at twelve eleven.

Or had it?

"These departure times," Don asked, "are they the scheduled times, or the actual? Things sometimes run late, especially when there's an emergency."

David looked up. "Good question. I'll find out." He beckoned to the lower level flunky who'd been assigned to keep the L.A. agents out of everyone else's hair.

Another spread sheet arrived within minutes, this one with slightly different—and improved—numbers; numbers that reflected the actual departure times of the trains in question. Don smiled grimly; that let out the train headed south and one of the trains going north. Both had left before midnight. "The gunmen didn't start shooting until twelve fifteen," he mused. "Even allowing for understandable errors of not looking at clocks, there would have been no reason for Charlie to get onto one of those trains until they did. Those two left before midnight; they weren't involved. Cross 'em off the list, David."

David did so. "That leaves us with four; no, five," he corrected himself. "This one, headed north, now makes it into the group. It was supposed to leave at eleven forty PM, but didn't make it out of the station until twelve twenty three AM." He peered more closely at the penciled-in notes in the margin. "The delay was in loading some of the freight cars. Canisters of something chemical-sounding. Haven't a clue what it's used for. Think we need to find out?"

Don's instincts were moving on. "Don't think so." He stared at the numbers, trying to make them tell him where his brother was. He compressed his lips into a tight line, picked up a pencil, and crossed off the pair headed west. "Too late," he said, and listened to his gut. His gut only rumbled contentedly, mildly reminding him that breakfast would be due soon and that his decision to cross off the western-bound trains was on the right track, pun intended. "If Charlie needed to escape, he'd grab a train that was in motion, and fast enough to get him away from the bullets." _Because my brother may be daft, but he's not crazy._ "And he wouldn't have access to the train schedules; he wouldn't know the destinations. He'd take any train that would fit his needs, wouldn't care about where it ended up as long as it was where the gunmen weren't. And the biggest need at the time would be escape."

Understanding lit up David's face. "Yeah. Timing is everything. It would override any other consideration. But how do we figure that part out? We can't narrow the window down any farther, Don."

"Watch me."

* * *

Who would have thought that the gas station landline phone was _also_ out of order? Charlie fumed, guiding the Caddy along the highway, watching the sun pour mid-morning light through the mountains. A hawk circled lazily in the sky, more to have something to do than for any real need for breakfast. Charlie had passed some road kill a mile back, and the vultures that were cleaning it up had hopped away for a moment in order to let him pass.

Don must be beyond frantic and into scared stiff, Charlie thought grimly, wishing that there was something else he could do to contact his brother. He eyed his cell, sitting on the seat beside him, the car rental contract papers weighted down by the small device. His laptop had been stashed on the floor of the vehicle, down and away from eyes rolling by and where Charlie could reassure himself of its presence with a single glance. Charlie estimated that without stopping, he'd be rolling into Denver mid-afternoon. Would Don still be in Denver at that time, or would he be searching someplace else? Could be either one. Charlie had a healthy respect for his brother's talents, and he suspected that Don was employing all of them at the moment to track Charlie down.

Well, there was nothing that Charlie could do at the moment. He glanced at the clock on the dashboard: seventeen minutes past twelve. He'd been on this highway for well over two hours, leaving Newcastle, Wyoming behind. Pretty little place, what he'd seen of it. Wonderful countryside that he was driving through. Charlie wouldn't have minded stopped to enjoy the scenery if circumstances had been different. Majestic mountains, deep blue sky; Charlie made a mental promise to himself to someday come back and properly explore this area.

Safe. What a wonderful feeling. _Safe._ There was no one else on the road, only the occasional car or semi rumbling past, headed in the opposite direction. Nobody with guns aimed at him, nobody following him, intent on murdering a simple math professor. Whoever would believe that math could be such a dangerous profession? Certainly not Charlie, and certainly not either Don or his father. Once again he thought: Don must be frantic.

Which led him to think once again about searching out a pay phone, something with a landline that couldn't be traced. Well, theoretically it could, but the odds of his pursuers listening in on the one pay phone that Charlie used to call Don bordered in the astronomical. Charlie was willing to take that chance.

And, to be honest, Charlie was still getting over being scared. It was one thing to know that someone wanted the information stored in his laptop and his head, it was another to realize that they were willing to kill to get it. And it made it very real to him to figure out that that someone was Charlie himself. Things like that happened only in spy novels and movies. It wasn't supposed to happen to him.

All of which made him very much want Don's presence beside him. His big brother would know what to do, had trained for this for years.

Flashback: Don, defending Charlie against that idiot kid, what was his name? Oh, yeah: Check. Short for Matuchek. Short, squat kid with shoulders like a line-backer but to eleven year old Charlie he looked taller than the Empire State Building. Check never bothered Charlie when he hung around Don, but if Check found Charlie by himself? Payback time, for all the homework problems that Charlie got right and wouldn't hand over the answers to Check. Cheating, the teachers called it. Extortion, was Charlie's dad's take, when Alan Eppes found out about it. Mr. and Mrs. Eppes would trek into school, have a conference with the principal, and things would turn into a waiting game for a couple of weeks until Check and his buddies decided that it was safe to torment the geek again. Charlie had learned to hide pretty good. _Led me to discover the joys of Pursuit Theory and how to use it to avoid you. Thanks, Check._

Sigh. _Things haven't changed much, have they, brother? Still defending me against the bullies._ Only this time the bullies are coming with guns, and—if Colby was right—missiles, and who knew what other jollies they could come up with? And this time Charlie would not just be pounded; he'd be dead.

Not a fun thought. Charlie found his foot gradually pushing down on the gas pedal, eased it up to something that the state troupers wouldn't blink at, trying to keep under both the literal and proverbial radar. It was time to make a pit stop, to refresh himself and, more importantly, try to find a way to contact Don without letting the terrorists know where he was.

Pursuit Theory. Charlie had used it himself while helping Don, used it to track the whereabouts of wanted criminals before they struck again. They had used it with Agent Edgerton to successfully determine where to head off a killer. Charlie reviewed the tenets in his mind, wondering if his pursuers were doing something similar with the goal of finding him. Probably not in quite such a formalized manner, but certainly they would be trying to out-think him, try to figure out where Charlie would light next. Charlie frowned; he needed to go against the odds, to do something unexpected in order to avoid these new and improved bullies. If they expected him to go _here_ , then Charlie needed to arrive _there_ instead.

Time to multi-task. One: find an appropriate town to pull off into, to refuel—the gas-guzzler's tank was already hovering around one-quarter—and, most importantly, to call Don. Two: figure out how the pursuers figured out that he would be at the train station. And three: determine where the killers were expecting him to be and then make plans to avoid that place. Three would be fairly easy, Charlie decided, once goal two had been accomplished. One could be done almost on auto-pilot.

 _Okay, let's look at two._ How did they find me? The first part Don had given him. Don had told him not to use the cell phone, and Charlie could understand that somehow the terrorists had tracked his line and had used the cell service to determine his location when he'd arrived in Denver. Don had done it, and so could the terrorists. By tracking his signal they had figured out where he was going and when he'd get there. From that, it must have been a simple task to alert some local sympathizers to put on ski hoods and pick up a couple of guns.

So Charlie reaffirmed his decision not to use his cell, even though it sat on the seat next to him, tempting him with two bars of power left in the battery.

Pursuit Theory: his pursuers undoubtedly knew that Don was on the scene, and that Charlie would either be waiting for Don to come get him, or that Charlie would be headed toward Don. That was the point of intersection. They would do their best to track Charlie through his cell, but that wouldn't work since Charlie had given up his cell for the duration. So the pursuers would be watching Don, see where the FBI agent led them. Which meant that they would do something drastic as soon as he approached his brother, maybe lob a grenade or possibly even another missile. Anyone who took down a plane, he decided, was certainly capable of overkill on the ground. Pun intended, he thought wryly.

Did he need to warn Don? Doubtful; Don was good at this kind of stuff. Maybe he'd even neutralized the terrorists, had discovered that they were watching David and he and had taken them out. No, not likely. If Don had removed the terrorists from the equation, he would have called Charlie to tell him that everything was now okay, that cell phones were back on the best-seller list. Best bet: Don knew that he was being followed but hadn't had the opportunity to apprehend the terrorists. Yeah, that was the best for the odds.

Besides, how could he warn Don? Charlie hadn't even found a landline phone yet. But Pursuit Theory did suggest that trying to get to Don might not be the best idea, at least not until Don and the rest of the FBI team had tightened up the security. Okay, if he wasn't going to go directly to Don or let Don come to him, where to next?

Simple: L.A. Only that would put Charlie on the road for a lot longer. How long? Charlie ran the numbers in his head, adding a hefty fudge factor for the lack of accuracy in his memory of road maps. Probably another day, assuming that he could keep driving for that long. _Big assumption, Eppes. Your ribs are killing you, your ankle is the size of a football, you're sweaty and grimy, and any establishment that you limp into is going to call the cops on general principles alone._ He glanced at the clock, noticed the screen with its dials. _Oh, yeah. GPS. Keep forgetting that. It'll take me right home if I ask it nicely, and tell me how long it will be. Won't change the amount of time, just make it a little more accurate._

The longer that Charlie was by himself, the higher the probability that the killers would be able to carry out their primary mission of homicide against math professors. _Your options aren't looking that good, Eppes. Get to Don and get you both killed, or drive to L.A. with a greater chance of the killers catching up with you._

L.A., Charlie decided. _If it's a choice between both of us getting killed, and only me getting killed, then I'll minimize the loss._

As if in approval of his logic, a sign floated by indicating that there were facilities at the next exit, five miles along. Charlie forced his lips into a grin. _Looking up._

* * *

The Denver office had established their bonafides, with the NSA chiming in loud and clear: _get Professor Eppes back into protective custody NOW!_ Special Agent Baxter had been assigned as their Denver liaison, and the man's suspicious nature had been mollified by repeated assaults by outside forces, mostly coming from Washington demanding all cooperation with the visiting Californians.

And Charlie still hadn't called in. How much trouble was it to find a landline? Don glared at his cell phone, wishing that it hadn't been necessary to tell his brother not to use the damn thing. He didn't regret the decision—that someone was using the same technology to hunt down Prof. Eppes was pretty obvious—but he did regret the necessity.

Fugitive Recovery. Not exactly a fugitive, not in the original sense of the word, but yeah, Charlie was a fugitive. He was escaping from the terrorists who were out to get him and whatever was on his laptop. And Washington was plenty scared. They'd let Don know that a team of crack experts were on their way from Washington courtesy of an Air Force jet to take over, because Prof. Eppes was that important. The task couldn't be left to the locals.

 _So what am I? Chopped liver?_ Yet another reason to find Charlie before the experts arrived to muddy the waters. And Don would have liked to have known what was so all-fired important about what Charlie was working on, but all of his questions had been rebuffed with a 'you don't need to know that, Eppes. National security matters.'

Just like when they were kids. Charlie was always the smart one, the one with the knowledge, with the plans, had to be protected so that the bullies wouldn't crunch him. Hah—Don wondered how their father would like being compared to the federal government. Both, once they found out about the problem, took steps to see that the bullying stopped. Alan Eppes, the original protester from the sixties, being compared to The Man.

Don resolutely put those thoughts away. They weren't helping. Bottom line, he needed to find Charlie, and fast.

With no better option, Don chose to return to the Denver train station, hoping to gain some insight into Charlie's actions. The station itself was closed to passengers, with an outside booth hastily erected in a nearby storefront for ticketing and the passengers walked to the trains through the cool autumn air and weather. The freight trains were still allowed to rumble through, all checked thoroughly by the Denver agents assisted by local law enforcement. Nothing further had been found.

There wasn't much. The bullet casings showed the terrorists to have used automatic weapons, probably M-16's. Forensics was still, hours later, picking up spent casings. Don and David along with Agent Baxter followed the trail of casings, now marked with small yellow flags to identify where they were found, walking out toward the tracks themselves. Don blinked as they exited the building, the noon sun beating down like a feather on their heads.

"You do realize," Baxter commented, "that we're following the gunmen, and not your brother?"

"You got a better idea?"

Baxter shrugged, and kept at it.

The trail ended at the tracks, several lanes all following a general east-west orientation. Don consulted his list of train departure times, trying to match the two. He dropped to his knees, examined the rough ground by the tracks.

"What'd'ya think?"

Don ignored the Denver agent. He rose smoothly, looked off into the west, then the east, and shrugged.

"Don?"

Don chewed on his lower lip. "Give me those times again, David."

David read off of the paper. "Twelve twelve. Twelve sixteen. Twelve twenty three. Twelve twenty five, held up for two minutes at the exit for twelve twenty three to finish passing—"

"Eliminate that one."

"Why?" Baxter wanted to know. "Eppes could have gotten onto that one. He wouldn't have known that it would get held up."

"If my brother had been on a train that had been stopped," Don carefully didn't look at the other man, "then he'd be dead right now and we'd have found the body. The terrorists would have caught up with the train. Eliminate that possibility, David."

David penciled a line through the entry. "Twelve thirty three is the last one."

"Too late," Don decided. "Our best guess is that the gunmen entered the train station somewhere between twelve ten AM and twelve sixteen. Even running at top speed," and Don was simply speaking out loud to see if his ideas held up in the light of day, "Charlie wouldn't have been able to make the twelve twelve. The gunmen enter at twelve ten." Don walked over to the double doors, the glass streaked with dirt preventing more light from entering. "They look around. It is now twelve eleven. They spot Charlie. They open fire." His voice stumbled slightly over the words. "Charlie has already entered the passenger waiting area, and is sitting on one of the benches. Let's make it this one, by the door to the freight area, although that's unlikely. He would more likely sit closer in, toward the crowd, as I told him." _Like Charlie listens to what I say?_ Don crossed to the bench that he identified. He peered out into the track area, trying to estimate times. He cocked his head. "David, time me."

"Don?"

"Go." Don took off at a fast sprint, making a beeline for the tracks, dodging around the first set of train cars on the nearest set of rails.

David and Baxter trailed after him, slower, David eying his watch and tripping over the objects in his path. "One minute. Two minutes. Two minutes; two minutes, forty four seconds," he finished triumphantly as he noted Don leaping onto a flat bed.

"Two minutes, forty four seconds," Don repeated. He looked around again, seeking inspiration. "First train we have left at twelve twelve. Even if the gunmen had entered at twelve ten, Charlie would have exited the passenger area at twelve twelve, and would have needed another two and three-quarters minutes to get onto the train. That lets out the train leaving at twelve twelve. At twelve fourteen or fifteen, the earliest possible time, the train would already be traveling at too great a velocity for Charlie to get onto it."

David agreed. "You're starting to sound like Charlie with all those numbers, Don."

Don grimaced. "What, you think using math is a new concept? Just because I take advantage of Charlie from time to time doesn't mean that I can't count to ten." He scanned the area again. "I'm seeing bullet casings here, and here. They were shooting at Charlie as he escaped. They wouldn't shoot unless they had something to aim at, something that they thought they could affect. What were the other times again?"

David glanced at the paper. "Twelve sixteen. Twelve twenty three. Twelve—"

"You can stop right there," Don decided. "It was one of those two, the sixteen or the twenty three. What tracks were they on?"

More paper consulting. "Track five and track eight."

"Where's track eight? I don't see it."

"Over there," Baxter pointed out. "It's beyond that wire fence. It's the one that they use for hazardous waste, stuff from the medical centers and chemical plants and the like."

"Which train was on that track?" Coldly. Thinking rationally. On the hunt.

"The twelve twenty three."

"Cross that one off." Don looked one last time at track number five. "It was the twelve sixteen. Charlie jumped onto the twelve sixteen, just as it had started to move. He would have selected one already in motion, since it offered the best probability of escaping the terrorists who were shooting at him. If it hadn't been in motion, the terrorists could have jumped onto the train with him and killed him. Likewise, hiding in a train not yet leaving would allow the terrorists time to search each car and find him." Next piece of the puzzle. "Where was the twelve sixteen headed?"

Baxter consulted his own notes. "North. To Cheyenne, and further north. You think your brother's up north in Cheyenne?"

"I'm thinking that it's time to haul our chopper pilot out of semi-retirement and find out."

* * *

Okay, the sign had told him that the amenities would be off the exit that was five miles from his previous position, but it _hadn't_ told him that he needed to go another ten along the secondary road before encountering those amenities. Charlie gritted his teeth and kept on driving. _Good thing the scenery was so pretty. Only thing that keeps me from turning around and heading back to the main road._ And: _better be a landline there._

Chugalug was a tiny little town with delusions of modernization. There was a small strip of stores ending in a larger all purpose government building, but that wasn't what Charlie was after. Phone, food, and fuel; not necessarily in that order. He raked his fingers through his hair, trying to persuade it to come off as 'artfully disheveled' rather than 'filthy mess', peering into the rear view mirror to gauge the effectiveness of his work. He grimaced; better, but still far from presentable.

Fuel came first, since the only gas station that Charlie could see was first up. He pulled in, presented his charge card to the attendant, and re-stocked his vehicle in case a fast getaway was in order. Not that he could imagine that it would be; Charlie had made himself a moving target, more difficult for the terrorists to find.

Food and a phone would be next. He pulled the car into a spot in front of the diner. There weren't many cars there; apparently the majority of the citizens of Chugalug had employment elsewhere and didn't have time on a Tuesday afternoon to take a genteel lunch in town. Even the kids were missing from playing in the streets, tossing a baseball back and forth, and Charlie realized that they all must be in school. A dog sauntered from around behind the diner and eyed Charlie, clearly wondering if it could somehow either beg or intimidate some scraps from Charlie. Charlie shook his head at the animal, and it slunk away.

Charlie stepped out of the car and yelped, almost crumbling to the dusty tarmac, his ankle sending out shrieking reminders that hiking long distances was not going to be happening for the next week at a minimum. He clutched onto the car door, trying to persuade it to cooperate just a little, just enough to get him inside the diner and to a phone. _No way_ , said his ankle. _Please?_ Charlie rotated the joint through a gingerly small circle, trying to loosen up the tightness, finally achieving grudging permission to hobble the short distance to the diner.

He managed to limp into the diner and into the rest room before anyone could take a good look at the quantity of walking dirt that just stepped into their clean establishment and call the local health department. Several minutes of scrubbing removed the worst of the excesses, though there was nothing he could do about the face fuzz. Hm…how would he look with a beard? Might be the time to find out. He peered at the mirror, deciding that he might even like an artfully grungy look, at least for a while. The cuts and bruises he could do without, and his clothes looked nothing short of a disaster.

He sighed. There wasn't anything to be done at the moment, and he wasn't about to look for a clothing store. No, what he needed now was to find a landline so that he could call Don, munch down a sandwich with something to drink, and get moving once again so that he'd be a moving target and not a stationary one that the killers could catch up with.

First: the pebble in his shoe which was the size of a small boulder. With a disgusted look at the semi-clean floor, he levered himself down to a sitting position to pull off the shoe and remove the offending chunk of granite. His injured ankle then demanded a period of recuperation before it would agree to cooperate in the walking process; it had been given a short break which was not nearly long enough to satisfy.

Charlie glanced at his watch; nearly one in the afternoon. Don must be well beyond frantic and ready to call out the National Guard—probably even ready to call back the ones stationed overseas to help in the search. He'd better get to a landline, and soon.

Charlie hobbled out to the entrance. "Just me," he greeted the hostess. "Today's special; soup and sandwich, please. But first, do you have a payphone I can use?"

"Sure thing, sugar. Right over there, by the pastry case."

Finally! And it even had a dial tone. Charlie tapped in a number that he knew by heart and listened to it ring. One ring, two—

"Please deposit two dollars and forty five cents."

Charlie hauled out a handful of change, digging hastily for quarters. He was finally reduced to dropping in almost every coin in his pockets before the computer voice would allow the call to continue.

"Thank you."

Third ring. Fourth.

"Eppes."

"Don?"

"Charlie!" There was no mistaking the relief. "You okay, buddy? Where are you?" Then—"this isn't your cell—"

"No, Don; no, it's not," Charlie reassured his brother.

"Where are you?"

Charlie looked around. "A diner in a little place called Chugalug, in Wyoming. I picked up a rental; I'm heading back toward Denver. This place is a bit north of Cheyenne—"

"David and I are already headed up toward you." In the background, Charlie could hear the loud whirring of helicopter blades whipping through the air. "David, haul out the map. Look for a place in Wyoming called Chugalug, a bit north of Cheyenne. How long before we can get there?" The last was directed at the pilot. Pause. "We can be there in about two hours, he says. It'll take another ten minutes to finish re-fueling and get up in the air. You going to be okay till then? Have you seen anyone suspicious?"

"Not a soul," Charlie replied, thinking that the only questionable character he'd seen so far in this town was the mangy mutt who'd growled at him in the parking lot. "Listen, I can get back on the road toward Cheyenne—"

"Not a chance!" Don interrupted. "You stay right where you are, buddy! We're coming to get you! Don't move!"

"Don—" _Whatever happened to the 'moving target' stuff?_

"Stay right there, Charlie. I mean it."

Charlie sighed. He knew better than to argue with Don. His older brother had been the same way all through high school: wait by the fence until practice is over. Don't leave the school until I can get there. Do as I say, because this is the one place where I can tell you what to do and really act like I'm older, because you're always squashing the hell out of me when it comes to the smarts department. Shut up and stay put, _little_ brother.

"You hear me, Charlie? I don't want you going anywhere. You know how many people there are breathing down my neck over where you are?"

Give the man any more rope, Charlie thought, and he'd start bringing up that time that Charlie had walked away from that camping trip they'd been on, the one where Dad had told Don to look after him. Or the time that Charlie had decided to head into L.A. to see the Dodgers play ball. He'd only wanted to see them up close, so that he could compare Don's batting form with the pro's so that he could help—

"Chuck!"

"Right here, Don." Charlie looked out into the parking lot, had to remember that he had rented the black sedan. A little blue convertible pulled into the parking lot beside it, and a bunch of kids in shorts, not really dressed for the autumn weather, jumped out. The driver fumbled with his keys, trying to activate the automatic passive lock. "I'll stay right here. I'll wait. Don't worry."

"Worry? Me? Why, just because they've tried to kill you three times in the last twenty-four hours?"

The teenage driver finally hit the right button. The blue convertible cheeped comfortingly: _I'll still be here when you get back from your sundaes, now that you've nicely protected me against car thieves._

"And they've missed every time—"

Charlie had seen plenty of fireballs in his time. Professor Eppes was well-known for his predilection to set up exciting demonstrations to illustrate whatever theory he was attempting to drill into young and impressionable minds. In addition, his colleague, Dr. Fleinhardt, was likewise addicted to hands-on displays of all sorts and welcomed assistance in the form of one Charles Eppes.

This outdid them all. Charlie's rental sedan, the one with the comfortable heated seats and the GPS and most other tech gadgets known to man, exploded in a wave of flame that rose well up over the roof of the diner, taking the little blue convertible with it. Three of the four teenagers were blown off of their feet, tumbling ten feet through the air. The fourth, a huskier build by far, simply toppled over to the ground.

Charlie froze, as did the rest of the diner patrons and the hostess and two waitresses. Then there was a general rush to the windows to gawk, and more than one patron pulled out their cell to report the emergency.

"Charlie?"

Two men, well-tanned, slender and muscular, crossed the parking lot swiftly, heading toward the debacle. They didn't look official, Charlie realized. They looked like the type who could have set up a car bomb, that just happened to get triggered prematurely by the passive locking device of a nearby car. They looked like the type that would be surveying their work, to see if they had incinerated the person that they wanted to incinerate. They looked like the type who could shoot at an unarmed math professor.

They looked like people that Charlie really didn't want to meet.

"Uh, Don?"

"Yes, Charlie?" Working for calm. Succeeding, but the effort was there.

"Someone just blew up my car." Charlie wasn't as successful.

Pause. Silent, deadly pause.

"Do they think you were in the car?"

"I'm not sure." Charlie watched the pair approach what used to be his rental, and was very grateful that he'd purchased accident insurance. "Uh, they're looking around."

"Go out the back," Don ordered. "Now! Don't let them see you. Let them think that you died in the fire."

Charlie ran.

Actually, he hobbled swiftly, his ankle protesting every step. _Gotta keep this cool, don't let anybody realize what's happening,_ he thought. Hanging up the phone was part of that cool, as if he'd finished the call. _Exit sign, where's the exit sign? Gotta have an exit sign, to show the back door, it's the law, gotta have one…_

There it was, just beyond the rest rooms where he'd spent so much time primping. Charlie regretted the wasted effort, wished that he'd just opted for take-out and a bottle of water and hopped back into the now demolished rental and been back on the road as a moving target. Charlie slipped out the back door, closing it behind him so that no one would notice until it was too late.

Trees. Forest. Underbrush, stuff that would cover his escape, keep him from being seen. It would be tough to crawl through but at this point Charlie needed the hiding place more than he needed to be in a place where there were other people. Especially if those people were trying to kill him. How had those killers found him? He was a moving target; they weren't supposed to be able to keep up with him. How had they done it? How had they gotten to him so fast?

* * *

"How did they get to him so fast?" David clambered back into the 'copter behind Don, almost shouting over the noise of the chopper blades. "He had a rental, Don. How could they have tracked him?"

Don was turning that very same thought in his own mind, over and over. "They couldn't have followed him," he realized. "Charlie jumped onto the train, was whisked away into the night up north. They could have gone back to the records just as we did, figured out where the train was headed, just as we did…" he trailed off.

"Don?"

A cold look seeped into Don's eyes. "If that were the case, they'd have taken him out at the train depot where he'd ended up. These terrorists have people all across the area; that's clear. They can call on any one of them at a moment's notice. And I can just bet that most of them have trained as snipers."

"Don, you're saying that they have the same access to records that we do. That they could find out where those trains are headed for."

"It's a possibility," Don allowed, "but I don't think it's the case here. They didn't have anyone at the train station when Charlie arrived there. He hopped off of the freight train, wandered into the center of town, rented a car and headed toward Denver…" Once again, he trailed off. David thoroughly wished that it wasn't so noisy above the sound of the chopper, that he could hear what Don was thinking.

The fierce look of triumph on Don's face made up for it. "He rented a car, David. He rented a car."

David blinked. "Tell me that the terrorists are monitoring every internet communication, Don. You're saying that they kept track of Hertz, Avis, and whatever other rental companies—"

"Not the rental agencies, David." Don paused. "Credit card usage."

The light bulb went off. David ground his teeth. "Of course. They don't need to track every mode of transportation. All they had to do, once they realized that Charlie wouldn't be calling you on the cell, was to wait for his credit card number to pop up on the grid."

Don nodded grimly. "And from there, they tracked him, and they extrapolated as to where he'd be going. And, in this case, he's headed toward me, in Denver. Which means that he was heading south, through Cheyenne. They've probably stationed people all along his route."

"They could even have figured out what the rental looks like, once they knew where he'd rented it from," David agreed. "Which puts them one up on us."

"Not any more. They blew it up." Don looked out the window. The countryside below looked tiny from up here. "I only hope they don't figure out that Charlie wasn't inside the car."

* * *

 _How did they find me?_

The first mad dash was over, finished in a flurry of exhausted breathing and an ankle which flat refused to work any longer. Charlie crumbled to his knees, catching himself against sore hands, looking desperately for a place to hide.

It didn't make sense. The killers shouldn't have known where Charlie was. He hadn't used his cell; they couldn't have tracked him that way. And though he wasn't an FBI agent or anything similar, Charlie was fairly certain that he hadn't been followed along Route 25. Having long stretches of road with no one else for miles around tended to bolster that notion. Had they put some sort of tracking device into the rental? That too was beyond the realms of possibility. Charlie had hopped off of the train before it entered town—hopped off onto one foot, his damaged ankle reminded him acidly—and walked—er, _limped_ —his way into civilization. They couldn't have tracked him that way.

No matter. Somehow, someone had tracked his movements well enough to muster a hit squad when he arrived in Chugalug. At the moment, it really didn't matter how. What did matter was that Charlie keep far enough ahead of the killers that they couldn't take aim at him. Charlie knew that there were people who could identify a weapon simply by the sound that it made—Don among them—but Charlie couldn't, and he didn't care that he couldn't. A bullet was a bullet, and if it entered Charlie's body at the right position Charlie would be dead no matter what caliber the killers used.

 _No distractions, Eppes! I've got to find a place to hide._ It was only common sense. He couldn't go any further; the stress and exhaustion was taking its toll. Hiking through the trees wasn't going to be happening any longer, not with his ankle returning to the size of a watermelon on steroids. He listened; was there anyone following him? There were a lot of sounds that normally he would have enjoyed: crickets calling to each other, bees zipping through the leaves in search of flowers. A stellar jay shrieked in the distance, no doubt warning a crow to keep away from the jay's nest. There was even the faint noise of water trickling down the mountainside at a distance. Charlie swallowed hard, wishing he were closer to the water, able to bend over and quench his thirst.

And, yes, there was something else. There was the sound of something much larger tramping through the trees. Some _one,_ actually. Someone who walked upright, on two legs, in the company of others.

Someone carrying a gun.

He needed a place to hide. Charlie cast around desperately. Where? His gaze lit upon a dark spot in the underbrush: a cave. And it looked deep enough to protect him.

* * *

The town police chief looked grim, and loaded for bear. "Special Agent Eppes, I know every one of these men—and women—and have known them since they and I were kids growing up. I'm vouching for them." Sean Clancy looked the part of a small town cop, someone who could handle just about any emergency that would come along, looked like someone that Don Eppes wanted to put his trust in. The man was a bit older than Don himself, had already donned a vest and held a well used and well cared for weapon in his hand. The half dozen people behind him nodded approvingly, and the way that each one held his or her own gun suggested plenty of their own practice. These were not 'city-slickers' out for a jay ride. Chief Clancy cocked his head. "None of us are particularly pleased with strangers coming into our town and blowing up a vehicle in front of Marsha's place and breaking a few bones besides. Kind of makes the coffee taste off." There was no humor in the remark.

Which was what Don wanted to hear; that and a shout of 'we found him!' He had no reason to trust these people and, with terrorists apparently on every street corner with a gun aiming for his brother, no reason to believe that there weren't any such killers in the bunch staring him in the face with angry and innocent looking eyes, but his gut was now screaming 'we're gonna be okay.' That these people were just as unhappy as he was that terrorists had dared to come into their nice clean town and made such an unholy mess.

The parking lot in front of the diner—Marsha's, everyone called it, although the sign out front simply said 'diner'—had been cordoned off as a crime scene, yellow tape encircling the remains of what used to be two cars. One looked possibly salvageable, if the convertible top was replaced and a whole lot of blue paint and bailing wire plastered into the wreck. The other—too damaged to even begin to figure out what kind of car it had been without a magnifying glass—was a total loss. It had been ground zero for the car bomb. No one was approaching either car or was inside the area. Chief Clancy had stationed one of his people—not one of the recently deputized bunch—to keep the kids away from a closer look and destroying the evidence. His entire force was only slightly larger than Don's entire team, and bodies were at a premium, hence the deputization of the locals; a practice, Chief Clancy explained, was routine in these parts where a town's population could numbers in the hundreds. A Forensics team from Cheyenne was on the their way up, he had added, and should be there within the hour.

There was one thing that Don didn't like, though: these people, for the most part, were deputized civilians. They could handle themselves, but they weren't trained. And they shouldn't be getting shot at by terrorists. That was a job for the FBI, and the police, and the National Guard, and the like. Not for townspeople pressed into service, no matter how good with a gun they were. This was the way people got killed, and Don said as much.

Chief Clancy got a peculiar look in his eye. "Special Agent Eppes," he said, drawling out his words, "a good number of these folks served our country for a number of years. Joe over there just got back from his second tour of duty in Iraq, and little Millie in front will be heading out for another tour in Afghanistan at the end of her leave time. And the only reason I'm standin' in front of you right now instead of my second shift watch commander is because my unit is on standby. Now, you've told me that you've got an unarmed man somewhere out there in the forest with the Good Lord knows how many miscreants trying to torch his tail for 'im. What say we get at the job at hand instead of wagging our tongues till sunset?"

Don's return grin went a bit crooked. "Yes, sir," he wisely said.

* * *

All right, so David Sinclair allowed himself to be impressed. He was no slouch at woodcraft, but the group he found himself with put him to shame.

Chief Clancy allowed David to make the tactical decisions, but the overall command remained with the police chief. "I know my people," was the man's comment and, seeing how both the cops and the off-duty soldiers conducted themselves, David wisely went along with the plan. Calling out a name seemed to improve communication a heck of a lot more than 'hey, you'.

Likewise was splitting the group into two. Don took one bunch with little Millie—who doubled as the third watch commander in her spare time—to back him up and help out with the 'you go here, Joe,' and 'watch where you're putting your dang feet, Lennie. You wanna mess up them tracks?'

There was one dog, and, since the dog belonged to Chief Clancy, Don sensibly allowed the animal to be assigned to David's group. He congratulated himself on making that decision before he learned that the dog would only put out for the chief, basing it instead on the thought that he had nothing of Charlie's for the dog to take the scent from. There wasn't much from the pursuers, either, but there were a few footprints that Marsha herself from the diner had pointed out. The pair of pursuers, dressed conservatively in business suits so that they stood out like sore thumbs in this small town, had crossed the parking lot with everyone else, eyeballed the fiery mess, and then headed off toward the trees. _Why_ toward the trees, no one had been able to figure out or even cared about, until Don and David choppered in. Then _everyone_ wanted to offer that tidbit of information to the FBI agents. Marsha had the clearest description, watching the pair as potential customers instead of focusing on the conflagration, so Don selected her details as the ones worth assigning David and his posse to.

So much for cheap entertainment.

Marsha was also able to give details about Charlie. Marsha, it seemed, had an eagle eye for customers, and had pegged Charlie as someone that she might have to wrench the money out of after he was finished eating.

"Why is that?" Don was almost afraid to ask.

"Looked like a bum with no cash," was the quick answer. "Dirty, even after he stopped in the rest room," Marsha told him, head held high. "Got tears in his clothes, like he ain't got no money for new jeans. Got a bunch of bruises on his face, like somebody rolled him for his wallet."

Okay, that fit for someone who had, in the past twenty four hours, survived a plane crash and several assassination attempts.

"Then he got onto the phone," Marsha continued, "and he talked for a bit. Had to add some extra coins into the box, so I figured that he was making a long distance call. Figured that his cell wasn't working, maybe out of juice or something."

Charlie still had his cell. Nice to know, but not much help at the moment. Contacting the man via cell would help Don locate Charlie, but wasn't about to happen. Not after Don had so carefully told Charlie not to use the cell. That the terrorists had somehow hacked into the tower system and had used it to locate the mathematician. Now it would have been nice to get his brother on the cell with the FBI's ability to beat out the terrorists on sheer speed alone, but it wasn't going to happen. No, it was time to go into straightforward tracking mode. _Hey, Edgerton, you somewhere close by, can lend a hand? Can use all the help I can get, right about now. I'm proud, but not stupid._

Don glanced at his watch: almost two in the afternoon, with the autumn sun trying its best to blaze down on them and failing miserably. A cool breeze seeped through the higher elevation, and Don welcomed it. After a few miles of hiking, that breeze would be a godsend. He turned to his 'troops'. "Move out."

* * *

The two groups had two different agendas, with the hope that one plan or the other would reel in the prize. David with Chief Clancy and the dog were trotting off after the terrorists, the dog's nose to the ground and snuffling. Don watched them hustle off into the undergrowth, following some barely seen trail that trickled through the trees, marking the direction so that he and his could strike off and cover more ground.

Marsha's memory had said that Charlie had limped off at a fast pace toward these trees, but she steadfastly insisted that the man had gone more south than the trail that the terrorists had taken. Don peered through the trees. Yeah, there was a trail there, just barely wide enough for a bulimic mouse to scoot through, but it was there. Don squatted to look.

Dirt: hard. But it still held just the faintest outline of a shoe, something more formal than the all purpose soft jobs that Charlie favored, but, Don recalled, Charlie had been returning from a Washington meeting that required a more formal attire. It had required a suit and a tie, and somehow a swoosh didn't pull the look together. And there were several small twigs bent and broken, the leaves going along with them, indicating that something, or some _one_ , had passed by here recently. Don was willing to bet that that someone was Charlie. "This way," he said quietly, leading his group off at a right angle to David's people.

It wasn't easy, following this trail. Despite Charlie's lack of knowledge of woodcraft, the forest was not yielding up its clue with grace. The ground was too hard to carry the prints, and the bushes too soft to break from the man's passage. There were signs, yes, but not as many as Don would have liked. It made for slow progress, and that satisfied Don not at all. He debated calling David back with Chief Clancy's dog, but decided that it would be too slow, that the other group would take too much time catching up with them.

Hah. There was a softer area, one on the bank of a stream, an area where the shoeprints clearly stood out. Yeah, it was Charlie. Don was certain of that, even if he hadn't been before. Shoe size: right around a ten. Stride: slightly shorter than Don's, making the target a little less tall than Don, also consistent with Don's brother. Don frowned; the man was clearly limping, which corresponded with the diner owner's description of how Charlie looked just before racing off into the forest. The distance between steps was getting smaller and smaller, as though his brother was slowing down. Maybe getting tired? Not a good sign. Slowing down meant more opportunity for the killers to catch up with him.

Then Charlie, apparently, had waded into the stream, trying to muddy the trail, no pun intended. It worked. Don cast his gaze up and down the gentle stream, trying to see where Charlie had emerged and failing. He tightened his lips. It was going to get more tough.

"Spread out," he directed. "Look for footprints on either side of the stream. Half of you take the north bank, and half the south. Call out if you see anything. Always stay in sight of at least one other person. And be careful! These men are killers. If you see someone, do not approach! I don't care that you're carrying rifles," he added, for more than one person acquired a smolder in dark eyes. "I need this done legally, and, more importantly, _safely._ I've got an unarmed victim out there"— _who happens to be my brother_ —"and the goal is to rescue him unharmed." Or at least not any more harmed than he already is. Walking away from a plane crash hadn't been exactly a stroll in the park. "Clear?"

It was. The half dozen posse members split themselves up into two groups, one heading upstream and the other down, each one gripping their rifle firmly. Don felt a moment's misgiving; it wouldn't take much for someone to aim at Charlie, thinking that it was one of the killers who'd just a couple of hours previously blown up someone's favorite blue convertible.

Yeah, finding Charlie himself sounded a heck of a lot better. These were good people backing him up, but they weren't federal agents. Most of 'em weren't even regular cops.

Which direction would Don himself go? Upstream, or down? Which group was most likely to go off half-cocked? More to the point, which group was more likely to find Charlie? That was the bunch that he wanted to be with. Better decide quick, he realized, since both halves were getting ready to disappear into the undergrowth.

The water was clear, suggesting that there was no one upstream muddying it, so Don decided to head down—wait a minute. There—what was that? Don leaned over to look, saw an ever so faint footstep that could very well be his brother's.

He leaned over some more, dropped to his knee beside the faint mark. It almost couldn't be seen, it was so shallow but once Don had spotted the edge of one heel, the rest of it etched itself back into the hard dirt. A bruised leaf followed, evidence that a fairly large body pushed itself through.

It could have been someone else, someone hiking several days ago. The dirt was hard, it might not have rained recently to wash the tracks out, it might not be Charlie. There could be a dozen different explanations. It could be the killers. But somehow, in his heart, Don knew that he'd found his brother's trail. Charlie wasn't going upstream or down, he was going cross-country. Why, Don had no idea. Charlie himself might not know why, might be simply trying for the most direct route away from his pursuers.

Then it hit him. He knew why Charlie was going cross-country, why he'd stopped in the little town of Chugalug instead of cutting straight through Cheyenne toward Denver. He knew why Charlie wasn't following the stream either upstream or downstream. It was the numbers. It was always the numbers.

Numbers would tell Charlie that driving straight south toward Don was the fastest way to get to safety, but Charlie would realize that the southern route was also the one that his pursuers were most likely to think of. His kid brother might not know the best way to track a suspect, but he knew Pursuit Theory and had demonstrated it to Don and his team on more than one occasion with the result of bringing home the suspect. Charlie would understand in a heartbeat that the best way to avoid his pursuers would be to do something that was statistically unlikely.

So what was statistically unlikely for his brother? Nobody would expect him to not head toward Denver, and big brother Don, for one thing. Chugalug was well to the west of Cheyenne, off the beaten track. Meek, mild math professor? Streak straight toward Don. So Charlie, knowing that they would expect him to do that, aimed in another direction. Where was he going? L.A., most likely. How his brother expected to drive for many hours without getting caught was beyond Don, but that was how Charlie's mind worked. Brilliant in math, but lacking in common sense.

Yeah, the killers wouldn't think that Charlie would be so foolish as to chose a different end point, but they'd get a clue real fast as soon as the data came in. They'd tracked Prof. Eppes through his cell phone, and Don had warned him against that. But Don would bet dollars to donuts that his brother wouldn't remember that people could also be tracked through the use of their credit cards. That every time Charlie filled his tank on the now demolished gas guzzler rental, he'd be sending out a signal to anyone who cared to hack into the system. If Don's people were looking for such things, Don would be more than happy to acknowledge that the other side was doing the same thing. It would take them a little more effort, but Don thoroughly believed that they were doing it. They were now tracking Charlie through the use of his credit card which sent off data signals every time the man stopped for the call of nature. And it wouldn't take long for them to figure out his statistically unlikely path because they were terrorists and not mathematicians who thought about what they were doing. The terrorists would just follow the trail, knowing that it would lead them to Charlie. Idiot brother.

Don applied the same concept to Charlie's current flight. Charlie was thinking carefully, calculating the odds. He couldn't help it; other people panicked, but Charlie calculated. Numbers were his security blanket, his pacifier. When lost, find a stream and then follow it to civilization and safety. Only safety, this time to Charlie, meant avoiding crowds and avoiding people in general. It meant avoiding places where he could shot at. So for Charlie, taught since they first went hiking to follow the stream, going against the statistical probabilities meant _not_ following the stream. It meant doing something statistically unlikely.  
So his brother went in a different direction. He didn't follow the stream; he went over the land.

Which meant that Don would go over the land, too, hoping that the terrorists would make the mistake that Charlie wanted them to. There was even a chance that it might work. Not a big chance, statistically speaking—to use Charlie's methods—but at least a chance.

All of which meant that he'd see if he could follow the prints in the shifting sand. There wasn't much time. Don made educated guesses as to which way a scared mathematician might travel, validated his guesses with broken twigs and bruised leaves at knee- and waist-level. Every so often he paused to see if he could hear anything, anything that sounded like his brother trying to stay quiet in the Wyoming forest but the only sounds that echoed back to him was the chirps of the forest denizens and the yells of his team back and forth to each other. Those yells became more distant, and he realized that he was getting farther and farther away from them.

Not good, but there wasn't any time to go back, not with Charlie's pursuers close on the trail themselves. Don debated hauling out his cell to find out David's location, but decided against it. Quiet was needed here.

There! He heard it. Something in the bush, something that sounded a bit larger than a squirrel and significantly more clumsy. Don perked his ears up, listened more closely. Not repeated; no, but there had definitely been something there. "Charlie?" he called out in a low voice.

No answer; not that Don had expected any. But it would have been nice. He eased himself in that direction.

There. There it was, plain as day: a clear footprint. The ground was hard, but the outline of a hard shoe—not a running shoe, but a more expensive model like what a visiting consultant might wear to a meeting with Uncle Sam—etched into the dirt. It was all but hidden under the broad leaves of some unidentifiable fern. Don set his foot down lightly beside it, just to verify that the size was a bit smaller than his own, that the size was something that might reasonably be assumed to belong to his brother.

Don took a moment to look around him, drinking in the sights. Where had his brother gotten to? The ground fell off in a steep cliff, the landscape demonstrating once again that Wyoming possessed mountains. Don estimated the angle at a bit more than forty five degrees, ending up in a grove of pine trees. There was no sign of Charlie, not that Don expected there to be. But the footprint pointed toward those trees, and so did another one a bit further on. Don advanced.

The forest had gone back to being silent. Don slipped along the forest floor, listening to everything, hearing everything. He heard the stream in the distance, the one that his posse was tracking, felt a moment of guilt for leaving them behind; guilt, laden with unease. _No back-up, Eppes? Not a good move, even if they are pseudo-civilians._ Hadn't heard anything from David, either; nothing to say that they'd treed the terrorists. Best to assume that there was still two people out there with rifles in their hands and malice in their hearts, gunning for a mathematician and his would-be rescuers.

The slope was steep, more than forty five degrees in certain places. Don picked his way down, peering at the ground for evidence that his brother had passed this way, seeing the scuff mark here, the pebble dislodged there. Yeah, someone had traveled down this hill and recently. The dirt underneath where that rock had been was fresh, not yet bleached by the sun. Moss had been scraped away by a shoe in another spot.

The prints headed toward that copse of pine trees. Don scanned the area beyond, not liking it. Boulders loomed high around, a perfect nest for a sniper. Of course, it was also a perfect place to hide without being seen, but anyone tracking Charlie as Don was would be led straight to that area of trees and boulders and wouldn't stop searching until they found and killed their prey.

Could Charlie be there? Good possibility. Don moved in.

The area was primarily pine trees, the big kind with branches made for easy climbing as long as no one minded the sticky pitch getting onto hands and never coming off unless a wire scrub brush was used. At the far end of the grove the ground turned back into a slope, the dirt held in only by the massive roots of the trees that he was looking at, and the angle tumbled down the mountainside to land in a rock-strewn river bank. Don slipped between the tree trunks, letting his feet glide over the carpeting of brown needles slowly turning back into dirt for recycling in the oldest sense of the word. The sharp tang of pine tickled his nose. He ignored it. His ears were what he was using at the moment, trying to hear the faintest sound of his brother.

And other things: where were the terrorists? Just because the dog had led David and Chief Clancy in another direction didn't mean that they hadn't swung around into this neck of the woods. And the lack of noise certainly suggested that David et al hadn't yet caught up with them, either. Don's cell would have been ringing off the hook to let Don know that little tidbit.

One end of the grove was the heavy end, laden with the boulders that Don had noted before. They were massive ones, deposited here by glaciers several eons ago. Different animals had made their dens in the welcoming nooks and crannies, that was clear, and even now Don caught a dusky whiff of some denizen. It would be easy for Charlie to hide himself within those walls with the added advantage that bullets wouldn't penetrate the stone.

"Charlie?" Don hissed, trying for a balance between quiet and being heard.

 _Scritch scritch._

Don froze. "Charlie?"

Silence.

 _Shit._

Don flung himself to the side, dodging behind one of those massive pine trees. Shots, too many to count, whipped past him, coming too close for the aim to be anything but deliberate. Don shut his brain down and went onto auto-pilot, his gun instantly in his hand and his eyes seeking a return target.

 _'Cause it sure as hell isn't Charlie shooting at me._

He rolled over onto his back, freeing his hands to check the clip: full. Good. Because he would need it. He put two slugs into the general direction of his attackers, just to let them know that this wouldn't be the cakewalk that they had originally intended.

 _Where the hell was Charlie?_

Now it was time for higher thought processes, something along the lines of _take the bastards down_ and _let's try to stay intact while we're doing it._ He scuttled further back, seeking more reliable shelter. This particular pine tree, although doing an outstanding job of covering his ass and other highly desirable pieces of his anatomy, was too skinny to provide any long term safe haven. Quick scan: boulder over there. Decision made; Don leaped and rolled, leaving a small scraping of skin behind as he slid along the rocks behind his new home. Another quick shot, force an opponent to pull back, cursing in some unknown tongue that Don was convinced David would recognize but Don sure as hell couldn't. Fumble with his cell, punch in the appropriate speed dial: "David, get over here!" As if his fellow FBI agent couldn't hear the shots from less than a mile away.

Shove the cell back into his pocket. Fire again. _Gotta conserve those bullets._ The other side's weapon(s) sounded a lot more like semi-automatics and a lot less like his own serviceable revolver, which meant that they were able to put a lot more lead into the air than he was. _Damn._ Where the hell was David? Where the hell was his own group of civilians pressed into a posse like the Old West? He could sure use some back up, praying that none of the civilians would get themselves killed.

Too much of a chance of that happening, and then what would the paperwork look like? That would be even worse than getting shot; that, and the ridicule that would follow. _Civilians, Eppes? Needed help from the village schoolmarm? Want some pansies for your desk?_

Where the hell was Sinclair? Where the hell was the cause of this mess, one over-educated and under-reasonable mathematician?

Another volley. Another return shot, reminding them that he was still armed and dangerous. A vibrating buzz from his cell; Don snuck a look at the mini-screen that told him that David had politely returned his call and had undoubtedly left a message to the effect of 'stay safe until I get there with reinforcements'. Don celebrated by aiming another singleton at the far grove of trees where he had seen movement, and was rewarded by hearing an anguished yelp. _Hah! Target practice was paying off._ He glanced at the clip, noting with dismay the meager number of bullets left to him.

 _Click._

Don froze. That slender _click_ came from behind him.

A small string of words behind him. Clearly a phrase, one that Don couldn't translate but had no doubt of what it meant. It meant that while Don's attention was on the shooter in the grove, another one had crept up behind him. It meant that the second killer had a gun aimed directly at Don's back. It meant that the killer had his finger on the trigger, and a bullet or three or four with Don's name on them.

It meant that Don's life was over.

The _freeze_ lasted less than a second. If he was going to die, he'd do it on his feet and facing what was about to come. Don slowly rose from his crouched position, hands carefully away from his sides, scanning the area out of the corners of both eyes, looking for some desperate last chance. If nothing else, he'd take this bastard with him if he got the chance. If he got the chance.

The killer stood sneering in front of him, the semi-automatic held not quite loosely in his hands. The description that Marsha, the diner owner, had given him fit to a tee: dark hair, dark skin, clear brown eyes. The man could have been a movie star if his inclinations had been a bit less blood-thirsty. Jeans, a tight-fitting polo across well-toned muscles. All this to take to his death; Don wished for his life to start flashing before his eyes. _I'd rather think about you, Mom. Dad's gonna be really upset that I got to be with you first, instead of him._

It was time. Don wasn't ready, but his murderer was. The man lifted the gun, prepared for a chest shot, something straight into his left ventricle—

 _Shout!_

A body came crashing out of the tree above them, half controlled fall and half belly flop. The gun went off. Don felt a sharp slice of fire whip through his shoulder and spin him around. Adrenalin tried to motivate him to jump forward but only got him as far as one step before searing agony took him to his knees in the cold and hard dirt.

 _Charlie!_

His brother jumped up off of the killer that he had just flattened through the judicious use of Sir Isaac Newton's Law of Gravity: what goes up, must come down. Charlie also used the concept of gravitational acceleration to ensure that the downward gravitational force would be adequate to knock the wind out of the man holding a gun on his big FBI brother.

More of Newton's Laws were to follow. Newton's Second Law: Force equals mass times acceleration. Charlie demonstrated that by accelerating his rather small fist into the gunman's face to arrive with a force greater than Don could have anticipated.

Newton's Third Law: to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. For Charlie's action, the gunman went staggering backward. For good measure, the gunman's eyes rolled back in his head, too. Given the circumstances, Don was more than satisfied with the 'reaction'.

Newton's First Law: an object in motion will remain in motion until acted upon by another force. The other force, in this instance, was the immovable boulder several feet behind the gunman. The boulder stopped the gunman's backward progression in a most satisfactory manner, cracking the man's skull against its hard surface. The man went limp and slid to the ground.

When the hell had this reversal of roles taken place? What was Charlie doing, manhandling the physical side of things? Was this some sort of cosmic revenge for Don figuring out with numbers which train Charlie had escaped on, back in Denver? Crap, his shoulder hurt like a—

"Don—"

"Get the gun," Don rasped, struggling to his feet. "Get the gun."

"Don—"

"Get the gun, I said!" Don clenched his teeth, trying not to let either the curses or the whimper of pain slip out.

Charlie limped over, bravery evaporating, gingerly picking up the weapon.

"Bring it here," Don demanded. If he didn't get the safety on and quick, Charlie would somehow manage to spray the rest of the clip all around this clearing. And there was another gunman out there, maybe more.

"Don, you're bleeding."

"And you're limping." Don took the semi from his brother. "You got your cell?"

"Yes, but—"

"Call David," Don ordered. "And get down." His brother was still a civilian, one that Don was sworn to protect. Cradling the semi in the crook of his good arm, he shoved Charlie down onto the ground behind the bullets.

There was shout from the other side of the clearing, a shout with a question mark at the end of it. Don had little to no trouble figuring out what it meant, despite the words in a foreign tongue. Don's answer: a round of gunfire from his newly acquired semi-automatic. Another shout—undoubtedly some sort of curse—told him that the response was equally understood, even if the bullets hadn't hit the mark in anything more than the cognitive sense.

"Don—"

"Down!" Don snarled, his attention elsewhere. "You get hold of David?"

"Yeah, he's on his way, but Don—"

"Watch out." Don's attention was entirely on the movement at the other side of the grove. "If I say move, you run!"

"Don, my laptop—"

"Later, Charlie!" The words came out more harshly than Don had intended, but apologies would have to wait. Laptops could be replaced. His brother's life could not. Don's life either, for that matter, but at the moment protecting Charlie was uppermost in his mind. These particular bullies were armed with guns instead of fists, but the principle was the same: _keep my little brother from getting crunched._ Don wasted another dozen bullets to ensure that the other side understood that Don Eppes had been looking out for his brother for a lot of years and intended to keep up the practice until further notice.

No response.

Don furrowed his brows. He listened, trying to hear what was going on over on the other side of the pine grove. He peered around the boulder, straining for any glimpse of movement.

"Don—"

"Shut up, Charlie." _Little busy here, buddy._

It looked entirely too quiet over there. There was no movement, the only sound that which leaked upward from the babbling brook several hundred yards from their location. Either the other man or men had moved on, or they were keeping as quiet as Don himself, hoping to lure the FBI agent into an injudicious move—

"Don—"

"Quiet!" This time with force. Did his brother _want_ to draw a shower of bullets down on them? Was the man completely bereft of all common sense? Don longed to shove his brother back against the boulder in a physical reminder to keep quiet, but knew that his damaged wing wouldn't cooperate. He'd have to be satisfied with the venom in his voice, and felt grimly relieved when Charlie bit his lip and slumped back, out of the line of potential fire. Don turned back to his target area.

Still quiet. There was still no movement among the pine trees, no wiggling of any of the underbrush—

No. _There._ Right there. Not even any sunlight glinting off of a dark metal gun barrel, just sheerest luck and a hell of lot of practice in tracking fugitives through the bush.

"Stay down," Don breathed, sensing more than seeing his brother's impatience. "Stay down."

The twitch came first, the twitch that signaled a spurt of fire. Don's answering shot came less than a millisecond later, cutting off the sound of the first, and he ducked back in response to the chip of stone knocked off of the boulder not two inches from his skull. An angry snarl from the other side of the grove indicated that something had happened over there. What, Don couldn't tell.

A shout: "Don! Where are you?"

Sinclair!

"David!" Don yelled back. He didn't need to caution the other agent. David would know by the sound of the shots that there were unfriendly hands holding weapons in the vicinity. Don chanced a quick look around the boulder, seeking the location of those hands.

Nothing. The gun barrel had withdrawn, and the leaves of the bushes slowly coming to a stop. Don ground his teeth; that meant that the suspects were making a fast retreat. He had the one that Charlie had brought down, but Don wanted them all.

"Don, my laptop—"

"We'll get it, Charlie." Don suddenly felt very weary, and his arm was on fire. He slumped back against the boulder, taking advantage of its unyielding firmness to hold himself upright. He could only imagine how his brother felt, having fled for the last two days from these killers, survived a plane crash and leaping on and off moving trains. Well, no, maybe he couldn't, because right now Charlie looked more worried about his laptop than about himself, damage and all. Any normal person would be falling over with relief that a squad of semi-civilian rescuers led by an FBI agent was coming to carry him away from all the madness. Not Charlie. All the man wanted was his laptop. "Wait for David."

"How bad is it?" Charlie himself looked pale and ready to fall over, but he pulled a grimy handkerchief from his pocket, determined to do battle with the slender trickle of blood leaking from his big brother's arm.

"Hey," Don objected, too tired to do more than speak.

The first touch of the cloth to his arm woke him up. "Hey," he objected again, this time more forcefully. That _hurt._ He took the handkerchief from Charlie, wondering if it would do more harm than good with all the filth.

"You were shot." Charlie's eyes were big and round.

"Yeah." Don managed a smile for reassurance before closing his eyes. "Not the first time, buddy. It's nothing." Still hurt like hell, though.

David arrived and took over. One quick look told the agent that both Eppes men were alive and breathing. "Secure the area," he told his troops. "Chief, see if you and your better half—" the dog, Don translated wryly—"can pick up where the suspect is heading. Millie, have your people spread out, form a perimeter."

"On it."

David wasn't done. "Joe, what can you get me to transport these men out of here? I'm going to need two stretchers, and an armed transport to the nearest medical facility. I can call in for federal help from there."

"I can walk," Don protested, opening his eyes back up.

"You may need to," Joe told him. "These trees are pretty tough to tote a litter through. I'll get on it, Mr. FBI guy," he added with a grin. "Don't leave without me."

"David," and Charlie struggled to his feet, "my laptop."

"Charlie," David started to object, and then relented, seeing the urgency in the man's face. "Where is it?"

"I left it over there." Charlie pointed. Don winced. The spot that Charlie had indicated looked uncomfortably close to where he had been aiming the semi-automatic toward. Don really hoped that he hadn't nailed the laptop through the CPU. He'd never hear the end of it from Charlie if he had. That thing was Charlie's baby. It was never far from his side.

"Millie?" David called to one of the deputies who looked extraordinarily competent with her rifle in her hands, searching for signs of the vanished killers. "You see a laptop anywhere over there?"

"Nope. You sure you left it here?"

"Yes." Charlie took a step, reaching for the boulder to steady himself since his ankle refused the chore. "It's there. It has to be there!" His voice started rising.

David caught him. "It's okay, Charlie. We'll find it. Sit down."

"No, you don't understand." Charlie clung to the FBI agent, wanting to hobble forward. "David, there was national security information on it. I have to find it!"

"You have protection on it." David refused to get upset, tried to ease Charlie back down to the ground so that he couldn't fall. "We have time. Even if those people took it, they won't be able to crack your security measures. I'm betting on Professor Eppes," he said, trying to reassure him. "We have time to work with, time to work things out before they can dig the info out. We'll let Washington know so that they can change their own codes—"

"David!" Charlie broke in. "David, it's not the security codes. I was heading back home with more documents to be decoded, stuff that has implications for terrorists living here in the United States _right now!_ David, somewhere near here in Wyoming is a cache with the names and addresses of fifty terrorist cells, and I have the answer on my laptop!"

* * *

Don had come to the conclusion that he really _really_ liked the small town of Chugalug, Wyoming, enough so that he could almost consider requesting that the FBI set up a small office here that Don himself could lead. There was the beautiful scenery; that was a given. There was something about fresh air washing down the mountainside that made a man want to inhale, and then inhale once again just for the joy of it.

And then there was the people; good, down-to-earth types with no nonsense to them. The type that understood that if you tried to wear high heeled shoes in these parts, the spiked heel was likely to sink into the soft dirt and get stuck. The type that understood that while the best use of paper forms in triplicate was to create bull's eyes for target practice, there were those silly enough in far off places who needed such things to justify their purpose in life and would make things miserable for those who didn't share their world view. And it didn't hurt that those same people in this pleasant town were more than a mite cranky to hear that there might—just might!—be a couple more unpleasant terrorist types nearby looking to undo all the good that the world had accomplished in the past few centuries.

Unfortunately, the FBI knew that establishing an outpost in Chugalug was a good way to invite a certain FBI agent and his hand-picked team to retire on full pay, pretending to work and yet not needing to do a thing to maintain law and order in this neck of the woods. And, enticing as it seemed at the moment, Don knew that neither he nor any of his team would be able to stand the thought of the world moving on without them. Retirement would have to wait for another twenty to thirty years or so.

Didn't mean that Don didn't appreciate what was happening on his behalf. They didn't have any heavy duty pain-killers on hand or a doctor in town, but Marsha from the diner turned out to have been a registered nurse in her younger days, and the cleaning up process that she initiated showed Don that the bullet had only scraped away an uncomfortable amount of flesh. He'd need antibiotics, Marsha announced, but that could wait until he saw someone not only with the legal authority to prescribe them but the physical presence of the pills as well. Didn't matter what _she_ thought, Marsha told him. The nearest pharmacy was a good twenty miles away. In the meantime, have a handful of ibuprofen.

Charlie was a different story. After cleaning up the various cuts and scrapes, Marsha shook her head and spoke quietly to David. David spoke to Charlie. Charlie shook his head. David spoke some more. Charlie shook his head more firmly. David tried again, and Charlie started getting upset.

"David?" Talking to Charlie wouldn't help, Don saw. His brother would only want to do what he wanted, wouldn't see any other side, wouldn't see the safety considerations. Don waited from his chair at the other end of the room for the combatants to come to him.

Despite his limp, Charlie arrived first. "Don, David is saying—"

"Don, Marsha thinks that Charlie has a couple of cracked ribs. He wants to stay here—"

"I need to find my laptop—"

"Megan is coming with an escort—"

"—not far from here—"

"—suspects may still be in the area—"

"Whoa, guys!" Don tried to throw up his hands in protest at the noise, down-graded it to a single hand when the other one thoughtfully and painfully reminded him that it was in a sling and was staying there until further notice or morphine, whichever came first. "Slow down." He pointed. "David: you first. What?"

"Charlie," and David swallowed the derogatory comment regarding common sense that followed, "wants to stay here. Out in the open. Where he can get shot at." He glared at Charlie. "He wants someone to crack some more of his ribs for him."

Don ignored the sarcasm. "Charlie?"

"I am not in the open," Charlie pointed out, sniffing. "I am inside the diner. Any bullet would go through the glass, requiring the shooter to be aware of the deflection properties which would cause the angle of intent to be skewed—"

"Charlie!"

"My laptop." Charlie ended the first argument and went on to his main premise. "I have to get it, Don. It's national security."

Don nodded. "You're right; we need it back. There's something very disturbing about the thought of that thing floating around in un-cleared hands. But that doesn't mean that _you_ have to be the one to get it." He pointed for emphasis. His one hand was the sole non-verbal weapon left to him, and he wasn't above using it. "Megan and a team will touch down within the hour. They can search better than either you or I, buddy. In case you hadn't noticed, you're not walking so good."

Charlie closed his eyes for a moment, praying for patience. "That's not what I mean. Don, the information is coded within a Greenburg-Rosencranz Paradox with a partially spiral-bound attachment—"

"Words of one syllable, buddy."

Charlie thought for a moment, trying to figure out how best to make his case. "Don, I can decipher the code."

"Never had any doubt as to that, Charlie."

 _Try again._ "The information that I figured out so far suggests that there is a cache of information in this immediate area."

"All the more reason to get you away from here," David put in.

Charlie shot him a dirty look. "There was a reason I was headed in this direction," he announced.

"Charlie, you were headed toward L.A. Or Denver."

"I was not. I was headed here. I was going against the statistical probabilities," he told them, chin held high. "This is close to their headquarters. They would never have expected me to come here."

"Charlie, they _found_ you here."

Charlie faltered. "Yes, well, that's beside the point. It _should_ have worked," he said plaintively. "All the theorems suggest—"

"Make your point, Charlie," Don told him. The man might be a genius, but on the other hand, he was an idiot. He managed to completely ignore the other ways that the pursuers had tracked him. "Tell me why I shouldn't bundle you up and send you straight back to L.A. as soon as Megan gets here with reinforcements."

"Because I know where the cache is," Charlie said triumphantly. "Or I will, as soon as I see my laptop. You have to get it back, Don. We may not have much more time. Those suspects will be after my laptop. They may figure out that I know about the cache of information, and try to move it before you can get to it."

"Of course, they could simply shoot you, and then no one will be able to get into your laptop even if we find it," Don pointed out, going for sweet reason.

Charlie waved that away. "You won't let that happen, Don. You and David and Megan, you're all expert FBI agents; you've done this sort of thing lots of times. Besides, I'm inside where it's safe—"

David gave a snort of exasperation. "I hear choppers. I'll go get Megan. You deal with him, Don." He turned and walked away before he could explode.

"Don—"

Special Agent Eppes indicated the comfortable chair next to him. "Sit down, Charlie. Take a load off. Elevate your ankle," he added pointedly. "And sit away from the window. I wouldn't put it past those guys to have a sniper in their midst." He waited until Charlie had hobbled to the chair that Don had directed him to and put dropped himself into it. Don could see the energy ebbing out of his brother now that the man had actually sat down. Pacing was like a drug to Charlie; it kept him going. Put him in one small spot, and the candle flickered down into something human-sized. "You've got one shot at this, buddy: tell me why you need to be here where people are shooting at you instead of back home in L.A."

"People get shot in L.A. too, Don," Charlie argued.

"Yeah, but it's not usually because they're carrying a laptop filled with national security stuff." Don's arm throbbed. He tried to ignore it. Somehow the over the counter crap just didn't cut it for a fresh bullet hole. "Keep going. Why here and not L.A.? Why can't you look at your laptop in L.A. as soon as we find it?"

"Because there are things _here_ that I need to see," Charlie told him as if it were the most natural thing in the world for the brothers to be conversing together in the little town of Chugalug, a place that neither one had heard of before today. "It makes a difference for how fast I can decipher the code. For example, it might reference the grocery store down the block, this diner that we're sitting in, a movie theater. Anything."

"And if we don't find your laptop?"

"You have to find it, Don." Charlie got very serious. "It not only has national security stuff on it, it's got some pieces of my Cognitive Emergence work. I can't afford to lose that."

 _National security worries him, but losing his research terrifies him. That's my brother._ Don sighed. "Nothing you've said so far has convinced me that you get to stay. You say you need to see things? You've worked without that before, and solved FBI cases without ever going to a crime scene. Besides, you've already seen this place. You're looking at it right now. And you don't have your laptop."

Charlie tried another tack. " _You're_ still here, Don."

"Yeah, and I intend to go home on the same flight that you do, buddy. I went on sick leave as soon as David dropped my ass in this chair, and I intend to stay on leave for the next several days. David is in charge of this little shindig now, at least until the Cheyenne office shows up and takes over. It's their jurisdiction. Next?"

"Takes over?" Charlie was outraged. "Don, this is your case. You can't just let them take over—"

"Can, and will," Don said cheerfully. "My case was escorting you back and forth to Washington, not running down terrorists in the back hills."

" _You_ didn't even do it. You assigned Colby to me," Charlie accused.

"Absolutely," Don agreed. "I assign Colby where ever I see fit, and right then he was the best man for the job. Not his fault that this turned into something a bit bigger."

Charlie sobered. "How is he?"

"Saw him in the hospital." Had it been just yesterday? It seemed like a lot longer. "He's sore, but he'll be fine. I'm going to sidetrack David to Denver to escort him home once we're finished here."

"I thought you said David was in charge. How come you're making the decisions?" Petulantly.

"Details." Don waved an airy hand. "You still haven't convinced me why you should stay."

"I need—"

"Don!" The call came from outside. "Don, you up for this?"

"Hold that thought," Don told Charlie. "I'll be right back." He hoisted himself up out of the increasingly comfortable seat, trying to jostle his arm as little as possible, and escaped from the interview with his brother.

David was with Chief Clancy and Millie out in the parking lot of the diner with the dog leaning against Millie and almost knocking the small woman over. Megan had joined them, dressed in jeans and a tee with a flak jacket stamped 'FBI' over everything. The revolver nestled in the holster under her arm looked large and lethal. All three were looking grim. No one yet had attempted to remove the two carcasses of the burned out cars, and the yellow police tape still cordoned off the area.

"Don," Megan greeted him, searching his face for signs of wear. "You okay? I heard."

"I'll live."

"Charlie?"

"Can't shut him down." Don turned the conversation around. "What have you got?"

David frowned. "More like what we haven't got. Chief Clancy and Megan found the case to Charlie's laptop."

"With the laptop missing." Don could guess that part. "You sure it's Charlie's?"

"Had his business card in it. Unless you know another Charles Eppes, Ph.D.?"

"Don't think the world could take the strain." Don too frowned, and sighed. "When's Cheyenne getting here?"

"Soon. They called for reinforcements from Denver, going to pair up their people with Chief Clancy's. Should be here any minute. You getting anywhere with Charlie?"

"There are times when he has a choice. This is not one of those times. We'll load him onto the chopper as soon as Cheyenne arrives and we clear the area. Until then, I don't want anyone in the air." Don looked at the helicopter that his boss at L.A. had assigned. It was a big one, able to easily fit the team of half a dozen that Megan had scrambled. It dwarfed the little four-seater nearby that had originally ferried David and he to the site of the plane crash. But memories of the hole in the jumbo jet that had taken Charlie's and Colby's flight down still echoed and sent shivers down his spine. That weapon of war was still out there somewhere; somewhere not too far away.

Megan nodded. "I'll have a couple of our people stick close to him," she said, detailing two of the men she'd brought with her. "You have any more info on the one that got away?"

"Only that he's vanished," Don grunted. "He saw David coming, and scooted."

Clancy took over the tale. "He knows the woods. The dog trailed him to the stream and lost him there."

"We found Charlie's laptop case another hundred yards away," Megan added. "We figure he took it out, tried to turn it on, didn't get anywhere, and headed back to his base." She looked away. "Sure wish we knew where he was going."

"He's going toward that cache of information," Don said. "If we knew where that was, we wouldn't need the laptop. Or Charlie." He sighed, his arm throbbing. "But when Cheyenne gets here, it won't matter. I'm packing us up, and heading back home. Let Cheyenne have the pleasure. It's their backyard. Wish they'd hurry up and get here." His cell buzzed in his pocket. Don dragged it out awkwardly with his good hand, holding it up to his ear after seeing that the number was from the L.A. office. Who would be calling him from there? All of his team was here except for Colby who was stuck in a hospital bed, and Colby wasn't in any shape to do any calling even if cells phones were allowed. "Eppes."

"Eppes? D'Angelo. What the hell is going on out there and why do I have the NSA not only breathing down my neck but shoving sharp spikes along with it? I just got off the phone with them, Eppes, and they are most certainly not happy! What kind of mess has that brother of yours gotten us into?" Pause for breath, not really long enough for Don to either close his mouth or formulate any sort of coherent response. "Never mind. Just fix it, and get the lot of you back here to L.A. where I can keep an eye on you. Clear?"

Don swallowed. "Clear, sir."

"Good. The NSA wants _you_ to handle this, Eppes. Heaven knows why, since you took so long just getting to this point, but they seem to think that letting additional people in on what's going on isn't in the nation's best interest. So handle it, finish it, and get your collective asses back here, Eppes. I want a report on my desk by ten AM Friday morning." _Click. Beep._ The line went dead, and the cell towers couldn't take responsibility for that one. The Area Director had hung up on him. Which was a measure of how concerned the AD was, and how helpless he felt sitting at this desk in faraway Los Angeles. Don could sympathize; at the moment he felt just as helpless.

"Don?" David looked at him, the question in his eyes.

Don grimaced. "I'm not really sure, but I think it sounds as though we've just been assigned to assist with this investigation here in Wyoming until it's completed." He cast a baleful look toward the interior of the diner. "Or until I get my hands on a certain brother of mine."

* * *

The only thing calm was the dated decor of Marsha's Diner. The atmosphere was charged with tension.

"I need to be here," Charlie repeated. "You weren't listening to me, Don."

"Yes, I was," Don contradicted. "You just weren't making any sense. Who did you call? Didn't I tell you not to use your cell?"

"I'm not on the run any more," Charlie pointed out. "I'm here with you and your team. I needed to check in with the NSA. It's safe—"

"Like hell it is!" The expletive exploded out of Don. "Charlie, start paying attention! Those people found you when you used your cell! They tracked your whereabouts! They know that you're here with us. Charlie, they tracked your credit card use, which is how they figured out that you were headed right for them! Are you _asking_ for them to come shoot you?"

Charlie blinked. "They tracked me?"

"Yeah, Charlie, they tracked you. They tracked you every time you used your credit card."

"My credit card." Charlie's face went dull. The information penetrated. "Every time I got gas…"

"That's right, buddy. You lit up like a UFO on Roswell's radar. Right now someone's probably figuring out what you had for breakfast."

By the look of him, that breakfast was now sitting like a lead mass in the pit of Charlie's stomach.

Don took pity on his brother. "That's why I had you stop using your cell, buddy. If I'd known that you were going to rent a car, I'd've told you not to use plastic. How do you think we track suspects? You think we only rely on phone tips?"

Charlie was white. "I should have known that. I should have remembered. I've used those systems to track suspects for you myself. I should have known better."

Don sighed, more for effect than anything else. "No help for it now. Times like this, nobody thinks clearly. Anybody could have made the same mistake. And, bottom line, you _are_ safe here with me and there are more FBI agents due to arrive any minute. Let's see what we can salvage from this mess. First, who did you call? Your bosses at the NSA?"

Charlie nodded somberly.

"Why am I not surprised?" Don grunted. "You told them that you needed to stay here and look for your laptop, whereupon they called my boss and raised a stink. Charlie, what if we don't find the thing? What if those terrorists got hold of it and tossed it into the river so that nobody has the information you have on it?"

"Don—"

"Face it, buddy. It's a damn good possibility." Don pushed back his chair, wincing once again as his arm reminded him that he was really supposed to be on sick leave, no matter what D'Angelo had said. No time for that now. He waved to the rest of his team, bringing them into the discussion. "Sit down," he invited them. "Give me an update on our situation." He leaned back into his chair, hoping that the update wouldn't require him to stand up for a while.

David started. "Chief Clancy and his people have teamed up with our people. They're combing through the woods, looking for anything that comes to light."

"And so far?"

"Sorry, Don. Nothing, unless you count Millie's engagement ring that she lost just before shipping out to Afghanistan." A weak smile. "They called off the engagement two weeks before she lost it, but Millie said that she had intended to keep it. Apparently now the guy found someone else in the military, and Millie says she's going to ship him the ring—if he pays for the shipping."

"Wonderful." Another sixty seconds that Don would never get back. "Megan?"

Megan had input. "The contingent from Cheyenne is ten minutes out from Chugalug, Don. They're bringing equipment with them, things to see if we can locate any hot bodies tramping through the woods that aren't our own. We're going on the assumption that the terrorists are local, Don. That's the only way we can explain their rapid response to Charlie. As soon as they got a tip as to where Charlie was, they acted within minutes. Charlie wasn't here in this diner more than twenty minutes before his rental got blown up. That suggests that someone was canvassing secure systems watching for him, and that they were able to notify someone in the area to act quickly. Now, the two men that witness saw near the car weren't people that the witnesses recognized, so they don't live in town. We're betting that they have some sort of camp or hideout nearby, something not too easy to find."

"Something that Chief Clancy isn't about to stumble over in his backyard," Don agreed. "This community likely has a number of very skilled hunters in it, and keeping a campground under wraps would take some doing. By the way, David, he did take that dog back out with him?"

"Sure did." Quick flash of white teeth. "Says that animal is the best cop on the force. The most useful," David amended, "since the most common call for assistance is when a toddler wanders off into the woods and mom wants to find him before the wolves do." He dragged himself back to the topic at hand. "Clancy isn't sure if the dog can do it, but he had the dog nose around the parking lot, trying to pick up the scent of the two men. They're all out there following where the dog is leading. So far they're running around in circles," he told Don with a grimace. "Don't know whether it's the dog, or whether the suspects went around in circles to try to throw us off."

Don nodded. "Keep at it. Keep me posted. Megan?"

Megan picked up the narrative. "The Denver office is coordinating with our office, looking for how they managed to track Charlie through cell calls and credit purchases. Those are _supposed_ to be secure transactions. Clearly the security needs a thorough overhaul, and the FBI is working on that task right now."

"That's a big task," Charlie observed. "Those transactions go through thousands of checkpoints."

"Exactly," Megan agreed, "which is why none of us are putting too much hope in it. The closer we get, the more likely that the persons responsible for the security breach will simply disappear and re-surface under another assumed name. But the mere act of weeding out the suspect will clean the system a bit more."

"Until the next breach occurs," Don said dryly. "Denver is welcome to it. Let them tie up manpower on a wild goose chase. They'll be done in a decade or so."

"Not as long as that, Don. Estimating sixty-three data points per man hour means that it will take—"

"Figure of speech, buddy. In the meantime," and Don turned a deceptively mild gaze upon his younger brother, "what will you be doing?"

Blank stare. "What do you mean?"

"I mean," and Don meant to drive the point home, "that there is no earthly reason for you to be here in Chugalug. Your laptop is not in your possession. You have no data to work with. The closest thing to a crime scene is either the parking lot with your rental car still smoldering or the spot in the woods where I got shot, both places that you have seen and will probably see in your nightmares for the next several months. And on top of that, Marsha thinks that you've got a couple of broken ribs from the plane crash to go along with all the bruises and the sprained ankle that you picked up while riding the trains like a hobo. I repeat, Charlie: why are you still here and not headed safely home to L.A.?"

"I—" The mouth worked, but nothing quite came out. Charlie flushed.

"Right." Debate won. Don didn't bother to gloat. He would save that for when he needed the upper hand and his own justification was weak. He got up from the oh-so-comfortable chair, suppressing the wince that ought to have accompanied the movement. It would have ruined the point he had just made. "Stay here, inside, where it's safe." _Where the bullies won't come after you_ hung in the air like a dust cloud stirred up in the playground. "Megan, you have the detail here." _Because if I stay here, inside where it's warm, I'm likely to go to sleep on my feet and fall over and ruin my desired image as a hard-ass and that will affect my over-all career standings._ He carefully ignored the look that Megan tossed in his direction, the almost-but-not-quite raised eyebrows. "Rotate our guys through here on guard duty; let 'em in for coffee and then back out into the trees to see what they can pick up. I only want our people on guard duty in the diner, not the folks from Cheyenne when they arrive. There's a mole out there somewhere in Techno-Land, and while I don't think it's one of our own within the department, even the Cheyenne office, I'd rather not take the chance." Next squad member: "David, you coordinate the Cheyenne contingent along with Clancy's people. I'll grab a map and start gridding the area so we can make this as efficient as possible. We're looking for two things: the laptop, and signs of squatters living off of the land that Chief Clancy doesn't know about. Questions?"

"These squatters," David asked, "what do we do if we find them?"

Don considered. "Monitor only. If they really are terrorists, I want more information before we move in." He thought again. "And maybe even a little more guidance from upstairs, so as not to stomp on anyone else's toes." _That_ aimed at Charlie and his connections.

David had another question. "What if they spot us?" Sideways look himself at Charlie. "Isn't this the group that we think took down a jet-liner with a surface to air missile?"

"Yeah." One corner of Don's mouth quirked upward. "If they spot you? Run like hell."

* * *

Don took over Chief Clancy's squad room as his operational headquarters, feeling right at home. The smell wasn't right—too much northern pine and not enough desert—but it reminded him pleasantly of his days in the Albuquerque office. The _feel_ was right, and that was what was important. There were computers, sure, but the desks that they sat on were old and rickety and threatened to dump the new-fangled hardware to the plank floor. There were papers everywhere, enough to make even Charlie's office look organized, with more files cascading out of overflowing bins and onto the floor where they belonged, skipping the waste baskets altogether. A cork board hung lopsidedly on one wall with announcements for the upcoming baseball game of the cops/firemen team versus the local high school. From the looks of things, the odds were skewed heavily toward the varsity kids.

Don spread his map out on the main table, penciling in his grid and lightly x'ing off the areas that they'd already searched. Some of the squares were easy; the one where they'd found Charlie, for example, right along this stream bed that looked like a river on this map but Don remembered it as more of a brook with delusions of grandeur. It probably gained a lot of momentum in the spring, Don decided, when it was fed by the melting snow coming off of the mountain. Didn't matter at the moment; they'd already searched the area thoroughly and come up with an empty laptop case and a lot of disappointment.

The whole area looked well-forested. Pretty area, but all too easy to hide a large group of people even with the amount of hunting that this town undoubtedly did. Don considered; maybe yes, maybe no. There would have to be some sign, something to keep people away from a group, something to indicate that someone was living beyond the town borders. Clancy seemed pretty savvy; Don was having a hard time thinking that the man wouldn't know what was going on. No, there had to be something that Don himself was missing. He stared at the map.

There were the roads, the main one that they had all come in on and a bunch of small ones that crisscrossed the town. There were the county roads that led to the various homes of people who preferred to dig in for the winter and only emerge for skiing expeditions to pick up marshmallows for their hot cocoa. And then there were large expanses of nothing but trees, untouched by anything more devastating than a hiking boot. Over here, on this end, looked like it had been cordoned off by the army for maneuvers, a no-man's land used for practicing whatever exercise the army decided was important at the moment.

Don pursed his lips. It had to be here. Charlie had headed in this direction because he believed that the terrorists were here. The man was lacking in common sense but the one thing that Don knew was that his brother could delve into a coded message and read it better than the high school valedictorian tutoring a third grader with See Spot Run. He sighed. Couldn't blame the man, but he really wished that his brother had hung onto his laptop as thoroughly in the grove of trees as when he was hopping rides on the rails. But what terrorist group in their right collective minds would set up shop right next to an army base? They'd be caught in two seconds flat.

On the other hand, what other place would be even half as convenient for tossing in a few dozen grenades? And Don wasn't about to forget that missile launcher that they'd somehow acquired. Tracking that thing down would be a major feather in someone's cap, and Don was afraid that the NSA had just assigned Don's own cap to acquire that feather.

David called in. "Don, we may have something here. We've got more than a few foot prints."

"Good. Where are you?" Don was already half-debating going to join the man, his damaged arm ignored in favor of the chase.

"Grid H six, almost over to seven. Got it?"

"Got it," Don confirmed. "You're getting close to where the army range is. You sure it belongs to our suspects?"

"Nope," was the honest answer. "Lots of unknowns here, Don. I've got two prints, a man's, and it could be someone from town. The prints look pretty old."

Damn. Well, there was always the chance that Charlie was wrong about where the terrorists' hang-out was. It could happen. It could. And it was more likely to happen when the man was being pursued by killers, getting dumped out of a plane, hopping trains, and getting his rental car blown up. Charlie could be wrong. "I'll contact Chief Clancy. If he and his dog haven't come up with anything, I'll have them work out toward your way."

Don considered the map, shifted the small token that represented David and his group over toward the next square. Clancy's mob was on the other side of the map, closer to where they'd rescued Charlie—his token got to be a little silver dog from a defunct Monopoly game. The Cheyenne group rated a cowboy hat from the same game. Don's arm throbbed.

Time to check in with the other groups. He tabbed the radio that Cheyenne had brought them. "Zapata?"

"Zapata here. What have you got, Eppes?" Rick Zapata from Cheyenne had happily turned over operational control to the man with the busted wing so that he himself could go tromping through the undergrowth and breathe fresh air instead of ink dust.

"David picked up a couple of prints in H six, but they don't look fresh. How are you doing?"

"Lots of birds, rodents, snakes, and a couple of turtles in the stream but nothing big enough to handle a bazooka," Zapata reported. "You sure your guy is on the money here?" Zapata was just going through the motions. He enjoyed being out there, and any excuse would do.

"No," Don replied gloomily. "I'll keep you posted." He closed down the link before Zapata could dig any deeper.

Clancy next.

"We've cleared A one, two, and three." The police chief of Chugalug was taking this business seriously. He wasn't an out-of-towner, and neither was his make-shift crew. This was their home and by damn it was going to be upstandingly American and no god-forsaken terrorists were going to sully the reputation of their beloved town. "Nothing."

Don nodded, even though Clancy couldn't see him. "Right. Listen, David found some old prints over near the army site. Work your way across the grid and join him. I want to see if that hound of yours can track anyone besides toddlers with dirty diapers."

A snort, half laughter and half derision, arrowed back over the air. "You got it, Special Agent Eppes. One dirty diaper, coming on up. What do I do if that diaper belongs to a soldier? That army preserve is off-limits to us civilian types."

Don considered. "Time to use some of my own connections," he told Chief Clancy. "If that pooch of yours leads you over the line, keep going but don't get shot. Our suspects aren't going to respect a line in the dirt, and neither should we. I'll find out who's in charge of the base out there and clear it with them. Maybe I'll even persuade the commander to loan us a few soldiers to help with the search."

"You do that, Special Agent Eppes. Don't know any names to give you; those soldiers seem to head straight for Cheyenne on their leave time and bypass us small town types right on by. Haven't ever seen hide nor hair of 'em. Barely know that the base is there."

Don grinned. L.A. was home, and he loved being able to call on high tech and forensics to solve his cases, but there was something to be said for small town common sense. He pulled out his cell, and got through to Area Director D'Angelo.

"I'll put a call into Washington, go through the circles," D'Angelo promised him. "I'll have a name and a phone number for you within the hour."

"Thank you, sir."

"And put that brother of yours on a leash; okay, Eppes? Getting him killed on an assignment will look bad on my resume, not to mention the glare that Marcy in Reception will give me from now on." The tone was light, but the underlying meaning sincere. "You know Marcy thinks of him like one of her own kids."

"Yes, sir. I will, sir. How's Washington coming with shooting out duplicate information? Charlie thinks he can reconfigure one of the police computers to handle the data stream if NSA can encode it adequately to get it across the 'net."

"They're working on it," D'Angelo told him, adding, "I understand that our own IT people have started a pool as to when it will be accomplished. Right now the favored time period is sometime next week." Pause to let the next comment sink in. "I'd better be able to see you and yours hovering around your desks here in L.A. _before_ next week, Eppes."

Don curved his lips upward. The area director was yanking his chain, and they both knew it. This detail was important. "Yes, sir. Planning on it, sir."  
"Good. Your caseload is backing up and needs some attention. Move it, Eppes." D'Angelo signed off.

Don sighed. Time to check on the object of the discussion. Don ambled across the street to the diner where he'd left his brother, Megan, and a couple of armed FBI agents from L.A. He pushed his way in through the door.

Agent Wesson, rifle cradled in his arms, greeted him wordlessly from the front of the diner.

"All quiet?"

"No sign of any trouble, Don," Wesson reassured him in a low voice.

"Charlie's not giving you a hard time?"

Wink. "Reeves has got him under control."

"That figures. Reeves has the touch of a—" Don trailed off, taking in the sight.

Charlie was seated in front of one of the tables, hands in front of him, the table top cleared of everything before him. There was a laptop pulled from the corners of the police station, but it was sitting, unused, on the diner counter top near the cash register, waiting for a signal that the duplicate information from Washington was winging its way here courtesy of a bunch of electrons. The table itself was bare. There wasn't a cup or a pencil or even a newspaper or magazine to pass the time. There wasn't any paper for penciled in numbers to appear on, courtesy of one frazzled mathematician frustrated into doodling meaningless scribbles. And his eyes were closed.

Not sleeping. Of that Don was certain, because his brother's fingers were dancing across a non-existent computer keyboard. There was no screen, no keyboard, no mouse sliding across a mouse pad, but the man was still acting as though he was bathing in the rays of the internet.

Across the table from him sat Megan Reeves, all of her attention focused on Charlie. Her voice was too low for Don to hear, but she held up a hand to stop her team leader from interrupting.

Wesson grinned. "Hypnosis," he whispered. "Damnedest thing I've ever seen. She's got your brother thinking that his laptop is in front of him, and he's pulling up the information out of his ass."

"Wonderful." Don didn't know what to think. He certainly wouldn't have thought of using hypnosis, wouldn't have even thought that Charlie might be amenable to using it. But there they were, sitting across from each other, Megan quietly coaching Charlie along.

"You see the code on the screen in front of you," she said. Don leaned forward, straining to hear what she was saying. "Is it numbers or letters? Figures?"

"Letters."

"You've seen the letters before. They're familiar to you. Can you see them?"

"Yes." Charlie's own voice could barely be heard.

"What's the sequence?"

"B. X. YTZ…" Charlie trailed off, thinking.

"Charlie?" Barely audible, yet still gently urging.

A barely perceptible shudder went through him. Charlie's eyes snapped open, yet it was clear that he was still seeing the 'computer screen' in front of him. "The depository is located in the First County Bank of Wyoming, safety deposit box 453, in the town of Chugalug, Wyoming. The key to the box is kept by…" Charlie stumbled to a halt, 'peering' at the non-existent screen.

"Charlie?" Still persuasive.

Charlie frowned, frowned again. "I…"

"Charlie?" Don wanted to shake his brother, shake the answer out of him.

"I…" The fingers had slowed. "I…can't…"

"It's all right, Charlie." Megan kept her tone reassuring. "Just take your time. See the letters. What are they?"

"A. G…Maybe a C… I can't see them!" Charlie groaned, covering his face with his hands. "Megan, I'm sorry. I can't see it anymore!" He looked up, saw Don for the first time. "Don!"

"Hey, it's okay, buddy." Don grabbed another chair one-handed, eased his backside onto it. "Were you doing what I thought you were doing? Were you remembering what was in that file on your laptop?"

Unaccountably, Charlie flushed. "Yeah."

Big question time. Don had just heard some pretty significant stuff coming out of his brother's mouth. "How certain are you of what you remembered, buddy?"  
Charlie swallowed hard. "It's hard to assign a probability to something like that, Don—"

"I don't care about probabilities." Don wanted to throttle the answer out of him. "How sure?" Hands icy still.

"I could be wrong—"

"How sure?"

Charlie looked his brother in the eye, unhappiness oozing forth. "Pretty damn sure, Don."

Don shoved his chair back. "Good enough for me."

* * *

Things were happening, but, unfortunately for Don's desire for action, they weren't things that he could actively affect.

Step one: a warrant for a certain safety deposit box located conveniently down the block. Given that this was national security, Don wanted a federal warrant and, considering that it was the NSA breathing down their necks, he was reasonably certain that the appropriate officials were approaching the appropriate federal judges to acquire that warrant in a timely fashion. What Homeland Security really wanted was for Don to go in and rip that box out of the wall ASAP with civil liberties be damned, but Don wasn't willing to go quite that far. Speed was essential, yes, but right now Don hadn't been given any reason to believe that the country was in imminent danger having one of its major cities go up in a mushroom cloud. On the other hand, if Don didn't hurry, then officials from Washington would arrive breathing fire, and then all hell would break loose before he could either contain it or get his team and his brother out of there for Washington to face the media storm and the ACLU. So speed was a major consideration, although not for the reasons that Washington thought that it was.

Step two: go to the aforementioned bank that Charlie had identified from his hypnosis-enhanced memory. Don might not have a warrant quite yet, but he did have a police chief vouching for him to the bank manager who was very willing to be helpful. Don could wait there with his team as easily as at the diner watching Charlie try to remember more from his laptop and as an added bonus start the process of digging out the records on the safety deposit box holder of interest.  
Not that Don was willing to allow Charlie to be left alone. The man might not yet have the duplicate info from Washington—and Don had an informal bet with himself that the officials would fly into Chugalug sooner than they could shoot out the data across a secure internet line—but Charlie was still the only person that Don knew of who could decipher the code. Charlie was the type of person that a dedicated terrorist would take great pride in killing. If the terrorist organization could slip a mole into a place where they could track a hapless mathematician through the use of his cell phone and credit cards, Don was willing to bet that they were quite aware of exactly Charlie was at the moment and were considering the best way to remove him from the planet Earth in a very permanent fashion.

Megan had already proven herself very adept at keeping the consultant under control and Don was more than happy to assign her to continuing that duty along with Wesson and his partner Heckler for additional firepower. The windows of the diner as well as the large expanse of parking lot allowed them to keep an eye out over a large expanse of territory, watching for anyone who might be approaching with their own gun in hand, and would make it difficult even for a long distance sniper to take out Don's brother. And, as an added benefit, Megan had promised to try hypnosis once again with Charlie, see if she could prod the genius-level brain into adding more detail to what they'd already accomplished. Heck, Don thought, maybe she could even get him to go to sleep. That would get Charlie off of Don's back.

Don himself was handling the bank part of this task force. It ought to be low risk, low stress, low activity, but with something this big Don wasn't taking any chances. He had two of the L.A. FBI types backing him up, both armed with heavy weaponry just in case. Chief Clancy had already called ahead to the bank manager, letting her know what was going on.

"Special Agent Eppes," she greeted him at the door to the First County Bank, a couple of her own security people behind her to add to the crowd. "Welcome to the First County Bank of Wyoming." Her tone was as sardonic as Chief Clancy's had been; Cheryl Otterbank knew exactly what was going on and was on a scrubbing mission in her building. She wanted the classified information out of there as much as Don himself. "I've pulled the records for you."

"Thanks," Don nodded. Cooperation; didn't get this in L.A. Not like this. He glanced around the bank, noting that the tellers had already been sent home and a small sign hung in the window telling people that the bank would be closed for the rest of today, sorry, we'll make it up to you on Saturday. The lobby too was empty except for Ms. Otterbank, her pair of security people, and another woman busily pulling off information from her computer. Even the shades were drawn, preventing others from peeking inside. "Sorry to interrupt business."

"It's Thursday," Ms. Otterbank told him cryptically, adding, "not many people come in on a Thursday. Most banking these days is done online, not in person. You were looking for the owner of box 453, right?"

"That's the one. You have a name?"

"A name and a signature. Amy?" she called to the woman behind the computer.

"Right here, Ms. Otterbank." Amy, looking barely out of high school, flipped back long blonde hair. She handed over the papers. After a quick glance, the bank manager handed them on to Don.

Don scanned the information: Joseph Garza, of 104 West Branch Lane, Rock River, Wyoming. "You know this man?"

"Wouldn't know him if he set foot in this bank," Cheryl Otterbank told him, "but here's the interesting thing. Amy, pull up the map of Rock River on the computer." They gathered around behind the blonde while she obediently tapped in the directions. "Rock River's not too far from here. I've lived in these parts for the better part of the last half century, Special Agent Eppes, and I've yet to hear of a West Branch Lane in Rock River. Town's just not that big; I kind of think that I'd notice it at some point. You, Amy?"

"Drove through there just last week," Amy affirmed. "No West Branch Lane that I saw."

It fit. "Fake address," Don said, "although I'll have Cheyenne check it out to be certain. How about the social security number?" He glanced at the documents in his hand. "I'll call it in…" He trailed off. "Maybe not. We already have evidence that they tracked Charlie's cell; I'm not going to take the chance that they've gotten my number as well. On the other hand, I don't think they'd be fore-sighted enough to grab all the landlines in the area." He did pull out his cell, tapped in a well-known and well-rehearsed set of digits.

Static. He sighed. "Bank vault?"

Ms. Otterbank nodded. "Bank vault. Too much iron. Interferes with the reception. Here, try my landline. 'Nine' for an outside line."

Don tapped in the numbers again, consulting his cell phone for the sequence.

"D'Angelo."

"Eppes, here. We may have a lead, but I'd rather not take the chance that they've tapped my cell," Don said. "Can I fax over the name and soc of a person of interest? And get it run in a hurry?"

"Send it through." Grunt. "Here's hoping that your suspects have as many problems with their budget as I do, and can't afford the personnel to monitor all the fax lines coming out of your town."

Don hit the 'send' button on the fax sitting on Amy's desk. "Me, too." The machine beeped, indicating that the paper had been sent successfully, and that it was running low on black ink.

"Hang on a second. I'm putting in the query." D'Angelo wasn't in a dallying sort of mood, and he was going to do this himself. He kept Don waiting, but not for long. "Right on the money, Eppes. Fake number for the social. Belongs to a little old lady in Omaha, Nebraska." Don could hear the Area Director frown across the miles from the mere sound of his voice alone. "Not liking this, Eppes. How soon before Washington sends you reinforcements? It's sounding like you may have stumbled onto something bigger than even I thought."

Don automatically glanced at his watch. Almost five, mountain time. "They're still flying in." _I hope._ "Not much place to land around here, and it takes a couple of hours by car if they fly into Cheyenne. Unless they make nice with the military, and can arrange to land at that army base not too far from here. Speaking of which, have you gotten any response from the army people? If we're looking at a heavily armed encampment of terrorists, I'd like to be able to call on our own side for a little more manpower and maybe even something that throws more lead than my handgun. I think you're right, sir, about this being big." This was getting more than a little fierce. Don was getting a hinky little itch between his shoulder blades, that little signal that kept screeching _something's up!_

"No." Another unseen frown across the miles. "And I should have heard by now. Hang on; let me double check my email." Silence, broken only by a gentle tapping several hundred miles away. The others, the two FBI agents and the two bank personnel, watched and waited, not knowing the other half of Don's discussion with his superior. D'Angelo finally came back on. "Got it. Opening…damn slow compu—huh?"

"Sir?"

"I don't believe…" More tapping.

"Sir?" Little butterflies, armed with icy cold stilettos, danced around Don's stomach, doing what butterflies with stilettos did when faced with adversity.

"Eppes, the army says they don't have a base there."

"That's impossible," Don protested. "The townspeople here all know about it, have been kept out by barbed wire and an attitude." His voice trickled off, thinking. He began to muse out loud, the better for others to follow his thoughts. "Except they don't usually see many army types in town."

"We don't see _any_ army types in town," Ms. Otterbank corrected dryly. "They avoid us."

"And I thought it was just because we were too tiny to have anything they wanted," Amy put in, making a moue. "Not enough different types of beer at the bar."

Don accepted the correction. "So if it isn't an army base, what is it?"

Silence. Cold, eerie, scary silence, while each person present contemplated scenarios too frightening to be said out loud.

So they danced around the topic.

"How many men do you have there, Eppes?" D'Angelo was all business.

"Nine of our people from L.A. Six more from the Cheyenne branch. Half a dozen from Chief Clancy and the people he's deputized. Twenty one, all told."

Amy opened her drawer and pulled out a handgun that would give a rifle feelings of inferiority. "Twenty two."

Cheryl Otterbank dug into the drawers of the desk two feet away, and laid her own weapon on top of a pile of bank statements. "Twenty three." She looked Don straight in the eye. "I dare say we could rustle up a couple more of the ladies to do their part. I suspect that you aren't aware, Special Agent Eppes, that Marsha in the diner took first place in our annual skeet shooting contest last year, beating out Chief Clancy by a single shot. And won the year before that."

Don fought down a grin. "No, ma'am, I wasn't aware of that. Thank you for informing me." He turned back to the phone. "It appears that we may have enough personnel to stave off an attack, sir, as long as our opponents don't have too many of their own over there but I would appreciate more back up. I suspect the local jail will be a bit too crowded to keep the civil rights people from complaining."

"You'll have your back up, Eppes," was D'Angelo's gruff response. "Watch your step."

"Yes, sir." Both men were trying for the prize as Grand Master of the Understatement. "I will." Don broke the connection.

This was not looking good and Don was feeling more than a little pain, and it was not centered in his wounded wing. He glanced around the interior of the bank, noting the thick brick wall and the equally thick polished glass windows. "Ladies, you know this town better than I do. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm thinking that the diner might not be the most secure place if shots are fired."

"I can vouch for that," Amy piped up. "A couple of months ago some fool let Ernie get hold of a shot gun. He's still paying for the window on the left as well as three seat cushions that Marsha made him replace."

"If you're looking for a secure hole to hide in, Special Agent Eppes, you'd best consider right here in this bank," Cheryl Otterbank told him grimly.

"Not the police station?"

"It's attached to the town hall. Too many exits, too many ways for people to get in and out. You'd have to station more than half of your people to guarding all the doors."

Don nodded, accepting her reasoning. Clearly the woman had done her homework, had carefully assessed her building in terms of defense just in case the Jesse James gang resurrected themselves in some fashion. "I'm thinking that running may not be the best option. It'll get us out of trouble but leave any suspects to run havoc through town until they're convinced that we're not here, and that would bother my sense of what's right with the world." He tightened his lips, coming to a conclusion, and dialed another number. "Megan?"

"Don?"

"You guys still okay over there?"

"Yes. Why? What did you find?"

"The warrant hasn't come through yet, but the owner of the safety deposit box is now very definitely a person of interest." Don filled her in. "Listen, I'm getting more and more concerned about what may go down in the next hour or so. Why don't you move Charlie and everyone else over here to the bank?" Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ms. Otterbank wave something papery in the air at him. "And it looks like our warrant to open one certain safety deposit box has just arrived on the fax. Get over here, Megan. Oh, and ask Marsha to come with you, and to bring her prize-winning pea-shooter," he added, gaining a nod of approval from Ms. Otterbank. "We're rounding up the troops."

He didn't get the opportunity to call David. The agent called in before Don could punch the speed dial.

"Don? David here. Listen, Don, we're at the army base, and, Don, this is no army base. Outside the perimeter fence there isn't an army sign to be seen. No equipment, no trucks, just a few tents, and a couple of pre-fab sheds from the local hardware store."

"Anything in those sheds?"

"Yeah." David's voice, already grim, grew even more bleak. "I found a Stinger, Don."

"A what?" Don's blood ran cold.

"A Stinger. The battery looks like crap, but there are two missiles sitting beside it." Pause. "Sounds like Colby was right about what took down that jet that he and Charlie were on."

"Yeah." Don was liking this less and less. And less. "Any warm bodies?"

"Not even any dead ones. The place is deserted."

"Deserted?" That hit hard.

"Completely. Not a soul in sight. There's no one here, Don."

Two options: either the suspects had fled or…

Don came to a decision. "Get back here, David. Get back here now. Leave one man behind to guard the Stinger, but get back here fast."

"Don?"

"Come back ready to shoot, David. And be careful."

"I will. Batten down your own hatches, Don," David added. "We'll make the best time that we can."

* * *

Drilling out the lock on the suspect safety deposit box was far from quiet, but it couldn't be helped. And, if what Don was thinking was accurate, by now silence was not something to be worrying over.

Attention was split inside the bank: most of it was on the operation going on to open the safety deposit box. Some of the attention was supposed to be focused on the exterior of the bank, keeping track of the vehicles that stopped in front of or near the bank, but for those assigned that onerous task, it was difficult not to watch.

Don himself had no difficulty. He'd assigned the two guards that Megan and Charlie had brought with them as well as his own two tag-alongs to the four points of the bank, and that was that. He knew that it was hard for them to keep watch. That was why he himself, wounded wing and all, wasn't doing it. Rank had its privileges, and Don was exercising his.

It was crowded inside the bank vault, but it was also going to be one of the safest places to be when bullets started flying outside. Chances of buckshot punching a hole through twelve inches of plate steel hovered between slim and none, and Don didn't need Charlie to calculate those odds. Cheryl Otterbank herself was doing the drilling with her assistant Amy looking on. Ms. Otterbank wore safety goggles that turned her face into something from a low budget horror flick and the metal dust was flying everywhere in the room. Megan made Charlie perch on a stool in the corner, keeping him out of the way while she alternately watched the drilling process and then transferred her attention to the FBI men on guard.

It didn't take long. The lock popped out with a final metallic wail. Ms. Otterbank pulled the goggles off, wiping her brow with a now dusty sleeve. She gestured: "All yours, Special Agent Eppes."

His arm hurt like hell, but Don wasn't about to pass this up. He stepped forward, wriggling the box out of its slot, the metal still hot from the abuse from the drill. He slipped it from its nest, placing it on the table in the center of the vault. He tipped open the lid, pulling the center box out and laying it next to the case.

Don swallowed hard. It was always like this, that little frisson of fear saying _what if I was wrong?_ What if there really wasn't anything more valuable in there than some little old lady's family jewels? What if the contents have nothing to do with national security? What if, what if, what if?

They were all watching him, the two bank employees and Megan and Charlie. Even the FBI guards and the two bank guards were sneaking peaks. At this point Don's arm was out of the sling and he wasn't noticing any danger signals coming from it. All of his attention was on the contents of the box.

He lifted the lid.

There wasn't much, simply a small sheaf of papers and another slip of paper with something written on it in flowing Arabic script. Don held that up with the edges of his fingertips: a prayer of some kind, something appropriate to the kind of people he was dealing with. The sheaf of papers was much more what he was looking for. Those papers contained tables of information, none of which Don could read despite the English letters.

Charlie was looking over his shoulder despite admonitions to stay seated on his stool out of the way, balancing on one foot. "Looks like a standard format of French-Cerulean cipher," was his opinion, starting to reach.

Don jerked it back. "Hold off, buddy. There might be fingerprints," he warned. "Let's make a copy of this for you."

"I've got it." Megan, always prepared, pulled a pair of latex gloves from her pocket and took the papers from Don. "We have access to a copier?"

"Front room," Ms. Otterbank directed her.

Moments later they had Charlie sitting at a desk, already lost in his own world, muttering to himself as he borrowed one of the bank's computers to support his analytical processing.

"You do realize that we're going to have to wipe that computer's hard drive when he's through," Don commented in an aside to Ms. Otterbank. "This is Homeland Security, and they won't take no for an answer."

A mischievous light appeared in hazel eyes. "Why do you think I gave him that one? It's not hooked up to our network, and it belongs to an assistant manager that I really wish would quit."

Next person to talk to: Charlie.

No response.

"Charlie?"

Don could have been talking to the steel bank vault for all the answers he got.

"Charlie!"

"What?!"

"How long?"

"I'm not sure," Charlie muttered, already trying to return to the fascinating problem in front of him. "Probably a couple of hours. Days, maybe. Unless this new technique I've been playing with might pan out…" His voice trailed off.

Don sighed. At least it wasn't PvNP. He had a chance, slim though it might at present, of pulling his brother back into the real world when the need arose. Speaking of which…

He went to check on the agents that Megan had brought with her, finding them bonding with the two bank security guards over cans of soda.

Heckler hoisted a cola to him, still keeping a wary eye on the street outside. "Been learning some new tricks, boss. These guys have figured out how to make vending machines cough up a can without putting in your nickel. Works every time."

"That's theft, Agent Heckler." Don felt the need to uphold the law, even under the circumstances.

"Nope," his partner, Wesson, chimed in. "They've got a little jar sitting on the bench next to it. You drop your money in there. You put money into the machine slot, it just flops out the bottom."

"Been like that for years," the bank guard assured him. "Ol' Jess runs the business. He's happy, we're happy, and we get our daily ration of fizz."

"And this way there's no problem getting change back," Heckler added. "Even if there's not the right change, you just keep a credit in the jar." He grinned. "And this is a bank. Who's going to steal _coins_ from a bank? They're all going to go for the high end hundred dollar bills, Special Agent Eppes."

Don just rolled his eyes. And then dropped some coins into the jar and snagged a drink for himself. "Marsha get in yet?"

"Just coming in now." The bank guard pointed at the heavy set woman ambling toward the building. Her gait may have been nonchalant, but there was nothing laid back about the way Marsha's eyes scanned the roadway outside.

"Everyone's tucked away, safe and sound," the diner owner reported, walking in through the thick glass doors. "The phone chain is in action, and all the kids are inside, even Jethro and Marge's kid who's digging through Jethro's things, looking for the key to the gun cabinet." She sniffed. "Kid thinks he's gonna be taking a few shots at whoever rides into to town." Another sniff. "Not if Marge has anything to say about it, and she will." The steel of Marsha's own rifle glinted, the barrel pointed down at the floor. Looking at her, Don had no doubt that the business end could be pointed at whatever needed pointing at, and in a hurry.

Good town Charlie had ended up in. Don thoroughly appreciated how helpful all the people around him were, especially considering that there was a distinct and realistic possibility of being shot at. Don couldn't imagine the reception that he would have gotten had this little scenario taken place on Rodeo Drive. _I'd still better avoid getting any of these fine citizens shot. Bad for public relations, if nothing else._ His own arm throbbed in agreement.

Last person to check on: Megan. Don went searching for the profiler, found her hanging up the phone. Unfortunately, the smile she greeted him with looked a bit anemic.

"That doesn't look like good news."

"It's not."

"Don't make me drag it out of you, Megan. Not in the mood."

"The Washington folks got a late start. Don't expect them here before ten tonight. Longer, if they miss the turn off."

Don's arm throbbed. "The turn off that my navigationally-impaired brother could find, and a crack team of FBI agents from national headquarters is going to miss?"

"That's the one." Megan fixed the smile, made it a bit brighter. "Of course, they are experts in fighting terrorism. What are the chances that they'll lose their way?"

A growl was Don's response. "They're bringing some decent firepower, right?"

"That, they're bringing. In fact, that's one of the things that's making them late. They couldn't find the requisition paperwork to sign it out, it's been that long since they've used it for anything more than the yearly emergency drill. They—"

"Don't even bring it up, Megan."

A shout from Heckler at the front window alerted them both. All pretense at humor vanished.

"Don! I see a truck—"

Marsha too joined both Don and Megan at the front window, peering out at the slowly moving vehicle coming down the main street. It was a small pick-up, possibly black under the caked on dust, with a single driver. The license plate had likewise been liberally coated with dust until the letters could no longer be seen. There was only the driver inside. The driver appeared to be scanning the area, looking for something. The driver's eyes spotted the bank. The truck sped up slightly.

Don knew what was about to happen, knew it as surely as he knew his own name. It happened all the time in Middle East countries. It wasn't supposed to happen here, in a small western town, but 'supposed to' wasn't going to apply.

"This is it," he called out grimly. "Everyone, stay alert. Take cover."

Time stretched out. Each second lasted for a minimum of half a minute.

The truck sped up.

The truck driver opened his door. He dove out and shoulder-rolled to a place of safety behind a small barricade of newspaper boxes.

The truck kept on coming, straight toward the bank. Driver-less.

No time.

No time for reasoned decisions, no time for plans of action based on statistical probabilities. Don knew what was about to happen, no probability or chance involved. Don acted. He stepped into the meager shelter of the doorway of the bank.

Proper form: handgun in his right, steadied with his left, muscles rock solid, bullet wound forgotten with the adrenaline. No need for cover just yet; the truck had no driver to shoot back. As calmly as if he were at target practice, Don put one bullet into each of the front tires.

The tires blew out, the truck swerving wildly, insisting on maintaining its forward momentum despite the sudden loss of traction.

Not going to be enough. Don dove back inside the bank, hoping the brick structure would protect them all against—

 _Wham!_

Felt like an earthquake on a bad day. The truck crashed into the front window, the thick glass shattering under the impact. The noise was secondary; Don registered it only as an adjunct to what was happening. In the background he heard someone yell—he thought it might have been Heckler—and a scared yelp from one of the bank guards.

No time for that. Five more cars rolled up behind the truck, and men spilled out, all waving guns and yelling. Bullets spat little spurts of fire from the muzzles.

No question about it. No concerns about whether this was a righteous shoot, whether or not a review board would approve his actions.

This was a battlefield.

Minimum of twenty of them, and only ten of the good guys. That meant that Don and his people were out-numbered two to one, and that was before the acknowledgement that Don's people included four bank employees, an owner of a local diner, and the math consultant who started this whole debacle. The men outside advanced, leap-frogging from one slender barrier to the next, firing automatics that spewed bullets across a wide area. Don popped up to take a shot, missed and ducked back down before he himself could become a wide open target. Another bullet found its mark: one of the enemy soldiers—for that was what they were: soldiers—spun and went down, only to drag himself to a seated position behind a concrete planter and resume firing with a determined zeal.

"Megan!" Don yelled. "Get on the phone to Washington! Tell 'em to burn the paperwork and get their asses here _now!_ Get the National Guard! Get _somebody!_ "

"On it!"

Out of the corner of his eye, Don could see Megan scuttle to the phone on Cheryl Otterbank's desk, reaching up from behind the safety of the meager cover to dial '9' for an outside line. Ms. Otterbank herself was positioned at a desk closer to the front and covered with glass shards, defending her building against the terrorists with an equally determined look in her eye and a revolver in her hand. Amy was right beside her boss, measuring her shots as professionally as any of Don's men. No terrorists were going to get through them!

 _Crash!_

A man dove through the broken window pane, automatic cradled against his chest. With a growl, Wesson tackled him, wrenching the weapon out of the man's arms and tossing it away to where the terrorist couldn't get to it. The terrorist leaped, trying to retrieve it, and Wesson grabbed him from behind. The man swung; Wesson ducked and jabbed back. Out came a knife.

Don couldn't spend the time watching the fight. He confiscated the automatic, making best use of it on the soldiers still outside, using his ears to keep track of Wesson's progress. "Somebody help Wesson!" he yelled. "Heckler!" 'Cause with a wounded wing Don sure as hell wasn't gonna be much good, and using the automatic that he had just picked up would take out most of his own side along with the terrorist. "Heckler!"

"Little busy here, boss." Another fusillade of shots.

"I got it, Don," Megan called out, her answer chopped off by a sudden screech from Wesson.

The knife had hit home. Wesson staggered back, blood dripping from a messy thigh wound. Wesson clapped his hand to the spot, tilting against a handy desk. The terrorist with the knife advanced with murder in his fevered eyes.

Megan intercepted. A downward strike almost knocked the knife from the man's hand.

The terrorist sneered. A simple female, no threat to him or his mission. He tried to backhand this weak and foolish American woman infidel, to teach her to respect men and to return to her designated place in life as a vessel for a man's children.

Block the backhand blow. Palm strike to the nose. Knee to the sweet spot.

Megan calmly stuck the bloody knife into her belt, ignoring the stains that seeped into her clothing. She also ignored the anguished and high-pitched whimper emanating from the terrorist at her feet. "Anybody got some rope to tie this one up?"

"There's some twine in the back." Amy hurried to get it.

"Bring out the first aid kit while you're at it, Amy," Marsha called after her. "Agent Wesson will need a little bit of tending to." She calmly placed another bullet exactly where she wanted it. "Gotcha, ya little buzzard." She turned around. " _Now_ I can look at that paper cut of yours, Agent Wesson."

Don grinned. He shouldn't be doing that, not here in the middle of a firefight, but he couldn't help it. This was a damn good team. They might be mostly civilians, but they were damn good for all of that and he was proud to be standing—or crouching—beside them. He aimed another shot, pleased to watch one of the enemy go down.

"Agent Eppes." Cheryl Otterbank, the bank manager, called him over to her position behind a desk that she'd shoved in front of the broken front window to provide herself with more cover. "Agent Eppes, look at that. They're up to something."

Don looked. The woman was right, there was something going on. Several of the enemy combatants had pulled back, were conferring a block away, casting evil looks toward their objective.

They needed more intel. Don looked around; his agent Heckler was covering the back entrance. "Heckler, you see anything out there? We may have a situation."

"The back alley is blocked, boss. I got two of 'em, hiding behind some trash bins. I can take 'em out with a grenade."

"You got a grenade handy, Heckler?"

"Nope. You?"

"I wish." Don frowned. _Not good._ "Keep an eye on them, in case we need to make a hasty exit with bullets to cover our escape."

"You got it."

One avenue accounted for, although not the way he'd like it to be. Don didn't know whether the enemy would try to come in that way or whether his group would need to use it to run for dear life, but either way that door was covered.

"Don!"

"Not now, Charlie." Don could recognize that voice from any angle. "Little busy."

"Don, I—"

"Not now, buddy." Don recognized that Charlie was at the end of his rope. Hell, the man had been through a plane crash, several episodes of people shooting at him, and an exploding car. Don would have been surprised if Charlie hadn't been just a mite on edge. Don kept his attention on the party outside. That was more pressing.

Apparently not to his brother. "Don!" Charlie insisted. Hell, the man was even ignoring the man on the floor, tied up and spitting curses in a universal language. Charlie grabbed Don's sleeve. "Don, the code! I cracked it!"

"Good. Give it to the NSA when they get here. It's got to wait, Charlie."

"It can't, Don. They're bringing in fissionable material over the border in _less than one hour! They're going to set off a nuclear bomb!_ "

"What?" _Crap!_ "Are you sure?" _Why don't you ever bring me a disaster when I can actually get around to it?_

"Of course I'm sure," Charlie told him irritably. "As soon as I deciphered the initial algorithms, everything fell into place—"

"All right, all right." Don tried desperately to multi-task: keep one part of his brain focused on the enemy outside and another on figuring out what to do with this newest hot potato. Where the hell was Sinclair and his bunch? Maybe the team from Cheyenne? They could really use the reinforcements right about now. But Don knew the answer to that one: David and his agents augmented with Chief Clancy's people were hustling their way back as fast as they could, but traveling by foot over land not meant for speed was going to take a while. The Cheyenne field agents would take even longer; they'd had the search areas further away. No help for it; Don couldn't count on David for back up.

Don had always been best under pressure. _Maybe because you've had too much experience with it, Eppes?_ His thinking snapped into the icy precision which was the equivalent of his brother's genius. Maybe Don didn't have Charlie's skill with numbers, but he was damn good at his own job. He was about to prove it.

Step one: intelligence. "Where will the border crossing take place?" he demanded of his brother. "Where are they bringing it in from?"

Charlie blinked. "Uh, at sea. The northern California coast. Two ships will meet, and the exchange will take place. Then they'll bring it back on land, and from there—"

"Good." Don cut him off. That meant that the meet was too far away for Don to get to, and thus out of his realm of influence. That led to the need to transfer this information to someone who could get there in time, someone like the Coast Guard, perhaps. And, since the NSA would throw a hissy fit if anyone other than themselves were the bearers of the bad tidings… "We need to call the NSA," he said out loud, listening to himself think. "We can't use a cell; there's no reception in here." Damn, but he hated needing to coordinate this many loose ends! Don would much rather work a small team, like what he had here at his fingertips. "If they get a clue that we knew about the transfer, they'll call it off and we'll never catch them. We can't let them suspect. They have to continue to think that we don't know what they're up to."

"Landline?" Ms. Otterbank offered, picking up the handset from the desk nearest to her. "It's a little low tech, but it tends to get the job done. Dial '9' for an outside…" Her voice trailed off.

"Ma'am?"

Frown. "I think they cut the wires," the bank manager said with a grimace. Another frown. "Don't they realize how much work it is to re-string those wires?"  
Don couldn't help the corner of his mouth that ascended. "I suspect they do, ma'am," he replied gravely. "Any other options?"

"The fax?" Amy put in, and made a face. "Oops. Also a landline. Sorry."

"Don't apologize," Don told her. "Keep thinking. We can do this." He went for a grin. "Smoke signals would get out, but probably wouldn't do much for rapid communication."

"Not unless we wanted to let someone know that the place is on fire," Megan put in dryly.

"Probably a little bit tough to put into code." Charlie too was trying to keep the tension from getting to them all. "Snail mail would do it, but I can't see the mailman picking up the mail under the circumstances."

"Oh, I don't know about that," Ms. Otterbank told him, a thoughtful look passing over her face. "The things we could tell you about that ornery old coot…"  
"Like the time he made his rounds in a blizzard, and didn't finish until midnight?" Amy too was trying to make the best of things.

Don tuned them out. He peered back at the group milling one block down the street, almost across from the police station. It was ironic: a police station empty of police. Everyone had turned out to first help find Charlie and then to track down the terrorists who had just waltzed into town to tear up the place as if this was a 'B' western. Now the police and the townspeople were all out at the camp where the terrorists weren't, all except those not suited for the hunt who were sensibly hunkered down inside homes far away from the action. If Don himself weren't in the middle of the fight, it would be funny. Hah, hah. He'd laugh later. Assuming that there was a 'later'.

No, it was time to create a plan. Objective one: stay alive, and keep everyone else in the same condition. Objective two: get the information that Charlie had decoded to those who could use it best, namely the NSA.

Wait a minute. Don had it backwards. What were the priorities? If that information didn't get out, and quick, the whole country could be looking for a sale on Geiger counters. Which meant that Objective Two needed to take precedence over Objective One. As much as Don valued his own hide and the hides of the others stuck in here in the bank along with him, he had to be realistic: this was bigger than the ten lives in this brick building.

Communication: out. Don had to assume that the cell phones that they had were compromised, that someone elsewhere in the terrorist organization had a mole in place to tap the lines, even if they could get reception. The one thing that no one could afford was for the terrorists to realize that their secret was out. If that happened, the terrorists and their cache of nuclear material would disappear only to show up in some other unlikely target. And, with the landlines cut, telephone communication was out. Likewise, the computers; the bank worked over those landlines and access to the outside internet had also been severed.

All of which meant that they somehow had to get Charlie's message out. If modern technology couldn't do it, then they'd have to come up with an alternate plan. Something low tech, something that the terrorists couldn't block.

It started to come together. Don didn't particularly like his plan, but better options were not crawling out of the woodwork. He flexed his fingers inside the sling, weighing how bad they felt. Would his injury slow him down? Probably not, 'probably' being the operative word. He glanced over the people in his little group: the civilians were out. Charlie was still crunched, his ankle the size of a watermelon on steroids and with ribs that wriggled every time he moved. Amy was in good physical shape, but 'good' wasn't the same as 'worked out every day and took a yearly fitness test besides'. The bank manager, Cheryl Otterbank, was past the time where good health included superior reflexes, and those reflexes were going to be needed if Don's plan was to be successful. Likewise, the bank guards: too many donuts from a diner with an excellent chef. And as for Marsha, the diner owner? She _was_ that excellent diner chef.

That left Megan and her two tagalongs, Heckler and Wesson. Wesson was down; that little slice along the thigh that Marsha was patching up guaranteed that. Heckler had the build of someone who was powerful but gave up speed to achieve that power. Don knew the man could run—he wouldn't have passed the physical if he couldn't—but that was a long way from what Don could do. And Don was well aware of how fast Megan was. He routinely signed off on her fitness reports, and knew that his own time beat hers by several seconds.

 _Any particular reason you're dawdling, Eppes?_

Yeah. This is a bitch of a mission, and it's about to get worse.

It wouldn't get better by waiting.

* * *

"I don't like this, Don." Megan peered out through the broken front window of the bank. In the distance she could still see more than a dozen terrorists who had taken over the street corner like a street gang waiting for their connection to show.

Try as he might, Don couldn't force out the chuckle that he wanted to reassure the profiler. He settled on soothing as the next best thing. "Neither do I. But I don't see a better plan. Do you?"

Megan glared at the gang on the street corner. "We could wait here for David and his group to arrive. Or the Marines. A nice squadron of paratroopers coming down on 'chutes, all armed with heavy duty automatics and big biceps. I like looking at big biceps," Megan announced. "I may not require them in the significant other of choice, but that doesn't mean that I can't enjoy looking at them."

Now the chuckle did emerge. And if it was a little too high-pitched and went on just a trifle too long, Megan didn't comment and Don was grateful. He left the woman at her post, eying the rest of the civilians watching out through the shattered front window.

Charlie stopped him. "Don, this is dangerous."

Don kept a poker face. "One of the joys of the job, buddy."

"Don, this is serious! You could get killed!" Charlie was ready to start shouting, that Don could easily see. The man had really been through too much in the past few days.

He took his brother by the shoulders, backing Charlie up against a handy desk and forced him into a half-sitting position. Once settled, Don himself took a more relaxed stance. "Yes, you're right, Charlie. This is serious. This is very serious. And so is the code that you deciphered." He gestured at the room, at the less than a dozen people all watching for the terrorists' next move. "Are you going to tell me that one life is worth the millions that will die if they move that nuclear material onto U.S. soil? Understand the numbers, Charlie," Don said deliberately, making his point the best way he knew how, the best way to get into his brother's head. "One versus a few million." He paused, letting that sink in. "I took an oath, Charlie; an oath to protect and to serve. So did Megan, and so did Heckler and Wesson. We meant it back then, and we mean it right now."

"But—"

"We _will_ stop them, Charlie." Don kept it resolute. "We will stop them here and now. You did your part: you deciphered their plans. Now it's my turn."

Charlie couldn't meet Don's eyes. "I should be doing this. I'm faster than you."

"No, you're not, Charlie, and you know it. This is a sprint, not long distance. And with a couple of cracked ribs to slow you down—"

"Bruised. I'm fine."

"Broken, until otherwise determined by an x-ray. And your ankle is sprained. Don't think that I haven't seen you limping. You can barely hobble from one spot to the next." Don abruptly went for another tactic. "You think I'm leaving you the easy job? Think again, buddy. There are over a dozen armed men out there, all thinking about how to kill every single one of us. Kill you, Charlie; you and everyone else in here."

Charlie looked away. "You _will_ be careful, won't you, Don?"

Don gripped his brother's shoulder. "Count on it."

His next and final stop was the back door, Heckler on guard with the heavy metal door cracked open so that he could see the alley way. "Anything?"

"Quiet as a tomb, boss," Heckler told him, then winced. "Sorry. Bad choice of words."

"Yeah." Don shrugged it off. It didn't mean anything. He could feel the adrenaline starting to flow, start his heart to pumping just that little bit faster, supplying his muscles with the additional oxygen that they would need for what he was about to do. He checked his handgun, noting the half-filled clip inside. Not much, but it would have to do. With luck, he wouldn't need his gun at all, not until his task was accomplished. Then he could re-supply, and finish off those bozos outside with a little help from some friends. "You ready?"

Heckler too had his gun in hand. "I'll keep 'em under control back here, boss. Those two behind the trash bin won't know what's going on."

"You do that." Don meant it. The pair in the back alley were the ones best placed to prevent him from getting to the world outside the ruined bank. They had the best view of his intended route. He gave Heckler a pat on the back, the reassurance meant more for himself than Heckler, and headed upstairs to the tiny offices located in the eves. From there he crawled out through the window and onto the roof of the bank building.

No starting gun to signal the beginning of the race. No crack of the bat, watching a bunt or a leisurely homer swinging out over right field. Right field; it was his favorite place to send the baseball over the fence. Not that he did all that many of them; Don had been a utility player, very good at adapting to whichever position needed a fresh pair of legs with a mitt. His specialty had been getting on base, rattling the pitcher by leading and bluffing into a nice cache of stolen bases. His stats on bases stolen had been impressive. Not impressive enough to get him into the majors, but good enough to make him an asset to the world of baseball and now hopefully good enough to keep him from getting killed.

Don peered around the exhaust pipe that vented the heating pipes from the bank, looking for anything, using hunter vision to focus in on anything that moved that might interfere with his plans. Nothing popped out immediately; a crumpled up wad of paper tumbled across the alleyway to end up next to a stray brown leaf waving in a slender breeze, the leaf waiting to shred itself into the ground for recycling. A squirrel scampered along the high wire above his head. No, wait; there they were, the pair that Heckler was watching in the alley behind the bank. But their attention was on the back door, the presumed escape route for the FBI team inside.

No benefit to waiting. Don eased himself into position, not bothering to close the window behind him. Too much chance of a stray squeak from the frame. Gun in hand, Don inched his way toward the far end of the bank building, eyes scanning the landscape and watching for the upward gaze of his opponents that would signal disaster.

Ears: the clang of something metal and heavy somewhere in the vicinity of the terrorists, followed by something that he couldn't quite hear but realized by the tone were curses. Megan and he were right. The men outside were planning something. Don had been right not to wait for David and his troops to arrive. Don needed to get Charlie's information out now, before the terrorists arrived to prevent its disclosure altogether. He could feel his heart beating, the blood throbbing through his veins.

The police station was a long distance away, in plain view of the group of men hovering around the cars they had arrived in. Don had two options: fast and lucky, and he'd be happy to take advantage of both. He needed to get into the station without being seen, otherwise they'd gang up on him and shoot him down before he could get to a phone. Hah. They'd shoot him down _before_ he got to the front door. Even the back entrance was visible to the terrorists, and Don couldn't remember any side door.

Except…

There was another option, one that he hadn't considered when coming up with this half-assed plan. There was Marsha's Diner, and Don wasn't talking about completing a coffee run with a side of Danish. For one thing, it was too late in the day for Danish. It was almost dinner time, and Don's stomach was uncomfortably reminding him of it, not that Don could see filling up on a hot meal. Tended to upset the digestion later when he got shot waddling away from the table. No, Don was remembering the phone in the diner, and more especially the phone in Marsha's office. The one that had very little likelihood of being tapped by nefarious terrorists. And the diner had the advantage of being on the _other_ side of the bank, away from the terrorists and their hawk-eyed gaze.  
Decision made. Time for action. Don eyed the distance between the bank and the adjoining building. _Good thing I'm in good shape._

Will it be good enough?

Gonna have to be.

So now what, Eppes? Finished talking to yourself? Waiting for an engraved invitation? Something delivered on a chased silver tray?

Deep breath. Don took off before he could talk himself out of it. Knees pumped, and he fired up to top speed as if the ball was streaking in to the third base that he was trying to steal before the pitcher caught him and threw at ninety miles per—

 _Leap!_

Ten feet, maybe a little more. Soaring through the air at the height of two stories, maybe twenty four feet above the cement. If he fell, maybe only a couple of broken legs—until the terrorists heard the commotion and came over to put a bullet through his head.

Reach. Grab. Connect. Scramble onto the meager safety of the adjoining rooftop, lungs heaving and begging for more oxygen. Don hunkered down flat on the roof and waited to see if his departure had been noticed.

Not yet. There was still the shouted orders, delivered in some unknown tongue with a sprinkling of English for the words that hadn't translated from one language into another, but it was the shouting of an overseer rather than the 'What the hell is that?' screech that Don feared to hear. From this vantage point he couldn't see what they were doing, but that was secondary. If he couldn't see them, then they couldn't see him. Don scurried to the edge of the roof of the building that he was on, located the fire escape, and shinnied down before anyone knew that Elvis had left the building.

Still an open road to cross, a mere two lanes that served as the main drag for Chugalug, Wyoming. Don high-tailed it three blocks down, crossed over, and hustled his way back up along the road, electing to go into the diner through the back door. The back door had a lock on it, one that Don broke into with the mental promise to make sure that Marsha got a new and improved model when this little party was over. It would be the least that he could do for the woman.

Safe! Although it was a meager safety. If anyone realized that Special Agent Don Eppes was in here, he would be a dead man. Okay, he'd just have to remain under the radar. In this case, staying under the radar meant staying below the level of the countertop. Don scuttled through the public area, scooting around the stools in front of the counter, sniffing the heavenly aromas of cooling coffee and a half-carved lemon meringue pie that had avoided being put back into the fridge before Chef Marsha had been called away by her country.

No time for that now. Don crawled beneath the cover of the counter around to the back office. The landline was sitting on a paper-strewn desk, a red light flashing to indicate that there was one or more messages waiting for the owner of the diner. Listening to those messages would likewise be delayed for a more opportune moment; say, something like after this particular little catastrophe was completed in a satisfactory manner. Don parked himself in Marsha's comfortable leather chair and dialed a number on her phone that he knew very well, starting with the area code. "Put me through to D'Angelo. Code Red, Marcy. This is for real."

* * *

Charlie moved up behind Megan, peering out through the shattered front window at the terrorists two blocks away. "They're still there."

"They're still there," Megan agreed, not looking around.

"What are they doing?"

Loaded question. Megan knew very well what the terrorists were doing, could see it in every move. The real question was: could she tell Charlie? What would his response be? Could she _afford_ to tell him, and take the risk that he'd panic?

"They're planning something," she said finally, compromising on how much to say. "They're trying to figure out how to get us out of here."

"How to kill us, you mean."

"There's that," she admitted. She kept her attention focused on the scene outside. _Priorities, Reeves:_ a scared mathematician under control or a gang of crazy terrorists bent on killing her and everyone around her. No contest. One of the men outside backed out of the car that they were working on, finishing his task. Megan had a funny feeling that she knew what he had done. "Remember, they still don't know that you've cracked their codes and deciphered their secrets. They don't know that Don got out to spread the word."

"You hope." It sounded pessimistic, but Megan could tell that Charlie was looking for reassurance.

She gave it to him. "I'm certain of it. First of all, Don's good at this. He's done these kinds of things for years. Second, if they had caught him, we'd know about it. They'd be yelling outside, and shouting." And you'd hear gunfire, Megan carefully didn't add. Charlie didn't need to be reminded of that.

"What are we going to do about those people out there? David is too far away to get here in less than thirty minutes. They look like they're almost finished with whatever it is that they're planning."

Panic or not, Megan had to take the risk. "You're right, Charlie. They're going to be coming soon. But we have the advantage; they don't know that Don will be catching them in a cross-fire as soon as they move in this direction. The way your brother shoots, I'll bet that he could take out a minimum of four of them before they realize what's happening." Now she did glance over her shoulder at him. Charlie was accurate in his assessment of the terrorists' movements. Whatever they're were planning, it would happen soon. The men outside knew as well as she did that help was on the way, and when it arrived it was game over. Megan looked down at Charlie's hands: empty. She frowned. "Charlie, when they start moving, I want you to crawl into someplace safe. Pick up something to throw or hit with, but the bullets are likely to be flying and you don't have a gun."

"I can shoot," Charlie protested faintly.

"Yes, you can," Megan agreed, "but there aren't enough weapons for everyone and certainly not enough bullets. You can help by being prepared for when they come into the bank—"

"They're moving!" Charlie interrupted. "Megan—!"

Megan flung her gaze back at the scene outside.

 _Crap._

* **

Don had long ago lost count on how many classes he'd taken on sniper warfare. There was a certain logic to it, a science that every sniper used, whether or not they knew it. There was the cover spot, a place to set up a nest, a place that would afford the sniper the best possible view of the target. It was usually, but not invariably, somewhere high. It likewise usually in a place where there wouldn't be a lot of things to get in between the sniper and the victim yet still provide cover. Don had taken a multitude of those classes, learned as much as he could about the behavior of the sniper, with the goal of being able to prevent a sniper from being successful. That was the typical case that he worked: preventing the sniper from getting the hit or, if the sniper had already struck, using that knowledge to bring the sniper to justice.

Don never thought that he'd someday be on the other side of the fence. The sniper side, not the pursuer side.

"Fast as you can, David," he said, closing up his cell, wishing that the laws of physics could be suspended for just an hour or two. The rest of the team, under Sinclair's command, was still almost half hour out. They were making best time—Chief Clancy's retirement nest egg was sitting in that bank!—but reality told them that they wouldn't be back in anything under twenty minutes.

Which had a good chance of being twenty minutes too late. The terrorists had been working on something as Don had exited the bank, and he doubted that they had slowed their pace. It was time to figure out what it was and how he could throw a monkey wrench into their plans. Oh, yeah, and keeping the people inside the bank from getting killed would be a real nice bonus.

Now it was time to put those sniper classes into a better use than he'd anticipated. He needed a spot where he could spy on those terrorists and, if necessary, take out as many as he could. Don slipped out the back employee entrance of the diner and hustled his way along the alley. Three blocks, he decided; three blocks to come up behind his target and still be able to see what they were doing. The supermarket could count as two blocks, since it was so large, and the local pharmacy made up the third. Don slid between the two buildings, keeping to the wall and listening for all he was worth.

There was plenty of quiet noise, but little that Don could figure out. The words were now all in some Arabic tongue, and Don couldn't pick out enough of it to decide whether it was Arabic, Farsi, or possibly even Urdu. With his luck, it would be some dialect that Don didn't know existed. Not that it mattered; what Don was interested in was what the men were doing. There was some banging, some metallic clanging, something going on with one of the cars that the men had brought. In the background there was the groans of someone who'd been shot, and Don savagely hoped that it hurt. He wondered if it the one that he'd winged earlier, and his arm twinged at him.

No help for it; he'd have to chance looking around the brick corner. Don hunkered down onto his knees, creeping forward, glad that the fading sun was at his back. It would help his vision, and hinder theirs.

It took him a moment to figure out what they were doing. Two were hovering over the engine in the car, and for a minute Don thought that the men were trying to fix something that had gone wrong. Three more were loading something into the back seat, with another pair fiddling in the trunk. The pair at the back end slammed the trunk closed, and that earned them a sharp retort from one of the group loading the back seat.

It clicked. Don knew exactly what they were doing, knew exactly how the group intended to take out the bank defenders and prevent the outside world from learning the larger details of the plot before it was too late. They didn't realize that their secret was already out, that the FBI was already in possession of the precious information and that even now Coast Guard cutters were racing across the waves to make the interception. If they had, Don knew, then the group of men in front of him would be getting into those vehicles and fleeing, their intention being to escape and hide until the next opportunity to wreak havoc arrived.

The car's engine roared into life, the noise ripping the air into shreds. With a shout, the men stepped back from the vehicle, the man inside pushing down on the gas pedal and forcing the car into a lumbering plunge forward.

Don watched the scenario play out as if it were happening in slow motion. He saw the car gather speed, gas feeding into the engine and driving it forward with ever increasing velocity. He saw the people inside the bank—he saw Megan's face, Ms. Otterbank's beside it—dart further back, hurriedly seeking shelter behind the shattered front of the building, their only defense the ruined pick up truck that had crunched the front wall and window a mere hour ago. Even the boom of the crash of the car into the wreck in front of it didn't register until an entire half second following the event. Shock pushed out the next sound, that of the car blowing up with heaven only knew how much explosives in the back seat and the trunk.

The front of the bank disappeared in a wall of flames. Chunks of concrete tumbled inward.

Don didn't even realize that he was firing his handgun until the enemy started to fall. The terrorists were between him and his people in the husk of the bank, and they had to go so that they couldn't stop Don from dashing in after them. One fell. Then another. Shots placed with deadly accuracy, no thought for his own exposed position. There was no time or energy left for his arm to remind him waspishly of his own injury, so he didn't feel it.

Charlie.

Megan.

Heckler and Wesson, his own people. The bank personnel. Marsha, the diner owner. All trapped in there, with the conflagration raging out of control. No way to get out. The building was collapsing around them, raining bricks the size of boulders onto unprotected flesh. Gunfire ripped out from behind the bank, preventing anyone from successfully escaping in that direction. Don could hear the screams, the cries, each one telling him that someone in that bank was dying in agony.

 _Are you calculating the probable trajectory of each flaming cinder block, Charlie? Or are you figuring out the probability of ending up in heaven, with Mom, or maybe someplace else? Where do mathematicians go when they die? Will you get the opportunity to discuss geometry with Pythagoras, maybe meet Euclid himself?_

What will I tell Dad? Hey, Dad, guess what? Charlie's dead. Incinerated. Bomb thing. Terrorists. And you know what? It wasn't working for the FBI this time, it was the NSA, so you can't blame me for this one.

As if that would make it all better.

"Don! Don!" Someone grabbed his wrist, and Don realized that he was clicking on empty. David tightened his hold. "Don!"

Don started to swing, checked himself. It was David.

"Don!" David held onto Don another long moment, to make certain that his team leader was once again under control. "They're gone."

"We don't know that—" Don automatically started to object, only to realize that David was referring to the terrorists.

There were bodies on the ground, but fewer than Don had seen prior to the explosion. Several must have run off—no, the other FBI agents had them under control, sitting on the ground, hands clasped behind their heads. Clancy and the townspeople that David had had with him were nowhere to be seen.

"Getting fire equipment," David said grimly, reading the question in Don's face. "They double as the fire department, too." It should have been funny. It wasn't. "Let's go."

They both knew what they had to do, couldn't wait for the fire equipment to arrive. _Couldn't wait for anything,_ thought Don. _Couldn't wait for the Washington team to get here, either. Tried to, and look what happened. Dead people all around. Dead terrorists, some of them by my hand. Dead people inside the bank. I suppose I ought to take the blame for those, too. My bright idea to hole up inside there. Best place to withstand a siege, or so I thought. Me. I was wrong. Turned into their funeral pyre._

Megan.

Charlie.

Charlie, with his mind so bright that Larry's nova suns seemed dim in comparison. Dead. Dead by his brother's hand, or his brother's stupidity. Same thing. _I killed him. Wanted to, when we were kids. He kept running after me, wanting to play with the big boys, not get beat up by the bullies walking home from school. He was always a pest, getting in my way. Dad always yelling that I ought to looking out for him. That he was special._

Special.

Aren't I special, too?

And felt guilty for even thinking about himself, running toward the still burning bank building, David's feet making a staccato pattern next to his.

Then: no time for thought. Only time for action. Grab one fiery cinder block and heave it away. Then another, racing to get inside. Where had the screams gone? Was everyone dead? Merely overcome by the fumes of smoke?

Someone shoved a pair of heavy gloves into his hands, which was how he realized that Clancy had arrived with the fire equipment. Powerful sprays of blessedly cold water shot into the interior of the bank, drenching whatever papers hadn't already been destroyed by the blast and soaking them into a soggy mess. A stray computer shot out a forlorn spark, sizzling until killed by yet another stream of water.

Where were the bodies?

Don had seen bodies burned before, had thrown up over the sickening stench of scorched flesh. It was the worst smell he could ever imagine, bar none.

Where were they?

 _Where were they?_

Hope flickered. They weren't here? The blast should have destroyed everything in its path, but Charlie and Megan and the others weren't in the path of the explosion. They were further back, were running toward the back of the bank. Maybe trying to get out through the exit, despite the terrorists positioned there to shoot anyone fleeing the fire?

The back of the bank… Don's eyes instinctively sought it out. The back of the bank, with the desks of scorched paper, and the bank vault behind those desks…

The bank vault with twelve inches of steel.

Closed.

Impervious to almost anything short of a nuke, or maybe a tank-buster, but that bazooka had been left back at the terrorists' base camp. It was too expensive to use on what had been thought to be a simple assassination plot. Even terrorists could make mistakes. See the devastation outside, all the men being put into handcuffs? Proof that terrorists made mistakes, just like Don did. The bank vault was closed, the outside blackened with soot, but closed.

"There!" he yelled, pointing.

"Don?"

"The bank vault!" Don whipped around. "It's closed! It's closed!" And, at David's blank stare, "they're in there!"

* * *

"Charlie's idea," Megan repeated, taking the oxygen mask away from her soot-grimed face in order to make herself understood. She coughed, and Don solicitously pushed the mask back over her nose and mouth. She was sitting on the sidewalk, a blanket over her shoulders, a paramedic nearby still fiddling with his equipment that had been dragged in from Cheyenne and looking for an opportunity to use it.

"Breathe," Don ordered. He really didn't like the profiler's color underneath all the soot. "You sure you're okay?"

Megan coughed again, sipped at the water in a paper cup and replaced the cup onto the ground. There was nothing available to put the cup onto. She grinned gamely. "I'm going to forego my usual five mile run tomorrow, if that's what you mean. But yeah, I'm okay. Go get Charlie."

"They're pulling him out now." Which meant that Don was going to be in the crowd helping despite his own injuries. He'd helped to pull Wesson out of the vault, the bandage that Marsha had slapped on soaked again with bright red blood. The chopper that the Washington people had flown in on had already loaded him and one of the injured terrorists for a quick trip back to Cheyenne and immediate medical care. Not that Don particularly cared about the terrorist, but he realized that the man might be a good source of additional intelligence, and that was something that couldn't be passed up. The head Washington guy had made that _very_ clear.

The car bomb had turned the bank into an inferno which, in turn, had melted the locking mechanism to the vault. Don had spent a few bad moments when he realized that that had happened, envisioning his brother and the others slowly suffocating to death, waiting for the help that would arrive too late. Clancy himself had hoisted a jack hammer to the roof of the vault and battered a small hole into the interior, which was how they had determined that all were alive. Don had had to sit down with relief. Then he bounced back up, hoping to help with the rest of the rescue, before the Washington folks arrived and pushed him out of the way, insisting on taking over from the locals and the visiting L.A. team.

Don joined the rest of the group. The massive door to the vault was wedged open, not one but three pairs of jaws of life stuck in to try to pry the door open. Once they'd assured themselves of a good source of air circulation, they started working on the actual extraction process. They'd managed to squeeze the vault door open a bare eighteen inches, and were still working to make it past twenty-four—Marsha, the owner of the diner and chief cook, was a _good_ chef.

Amy maneuvered her way out past the eighteen inches of vault door, accepting the help from rescuers to be yanked free. Her belt caught on the melted steel lever, one of Chief Clancy's rescuers detaching it and hissing when the hot metal accidentally touched bare fingers. She was whisked away for a quick once-over by the Cheyenne medic and then grabbed by the Washington contingent for questioning and a stern admonition not to talk about recent events.

Ms. Otterbank was next, her spare frame easily passing through. She held her hand awkwardly. Don gave her a look.

She grimaced. "Not as young as I used to be, Agent Eppes. Just a sprain."

Don nodded. The soot on her face would wash off, as would most of her injuries. The wrist might take a little longer, but would heal. He waited.

He could have guessed: the bank laptop that Charlie borrowed came first.

"Be careful with it; it contains valuable data." The voice floated out, querulous and over-tired but still recognizable, and laced with pain. "Washington wants what's on there." Pause. "Don? Don? Are you out there?"

"Right here, Charlie." Don had never been so glad to hear his brother's voice. Well, maybe there was that once, when he'd thought that that bully—what was his name? Check?—had beaten him to Charlie and he was going to have to explain why he wasn't where he was supposed to be and why he was with this really good-looking cheerleader whose name he couldn't remember instead of looking out for his baby brother…Don wrenched his thoughts back to the present.

"Hang onto that laptop, Don." Which meant that Charlie was really hurting, if he didn't trust himself to keep track of his beloved laptop. The electronic toy was covered in soot, with a small scrape marring the top surface. It seemed miraculous to Don that the laptop had made it through the entire journey with only that scrape as damage. Of all of them, it seemed to have arrived in the best shape, certainly better than his brother, only now emerging from within the heavy vault that had saved his life. Charlie fixed his brother with a steely gaze that belied his injured status. "The NSA is going to need what's on it."

Only Don could hear the sub-text in Charlie's words, that Charlie had more of whatever theorem that he was working on in the guts of that toy. And that if Don wanted Charlie to help out on an FBI case ever again, then Don had better make sure that Charlie's laptop stayed as intact as Charlie's homework had while they were growing up. Don grinned. That was his brother. Didn't matter whether the bullies were the home grown American type or built on foreign soil, the Eppes brothers would face them together.

Don grabbed the laptop with his good hand from the rescuer that handed it out to him, ignoring the sharp ache that was creeping back into his arm now that the adrenalin was departing. "Got it, buddy."

"Good." Charlie's face appeared at the crack in the vault, more hands grabbing onto him and easing him—make that _wrenching_ , with the slight dimensions of the aperture—through the opening and toward a waiting stretcher. "Ow. I don't need that," he complained, trying to resist. "I can walk—ow." His ankle gave out, and he grabbed frantically for the nearest support: the burly shoulder of Chief Clancy. "Uh, maybe that's not such a good idea. Maybe I could just lean on someone. Don—"

"Stretcher, Dr. Eppes." Clancy grinned. As an upstanding member of the local emergency medical team as well as police chief and fire chief, he'd seen this before. All he had to do was wait. Another man, with a vest emblazoned with 'FBI' across the back, stood beside him with the same grin.

"Uh…yeah…" Charlie's face went suddenly white, and the only reason he didn't collapse onto the stretcher was that there were a number of hands to help ease him down.

"Charlie?" Suddenly alarmed, Don started forward, the laptop forgotten in his arms.

More people pushed him back. "It's all right, Special Agent Eppes. He's just a little shocky right now." Chief Clancy raised his voice. "Can I get a little O2 over here?"

"He's—"

"I know, Special Agent Eppes." The FBI man grinned, white teeth flashing. "We've got our orders. And you do, too. Let us take over. It's finally time for you to take medical leave."

"But—"

"Can I get a medic over here?" the man called out. "Special Agent Eppes needs—"

David appeared at his elbow. "Don, are you all right—?"

Don sighed. He suddenly felt very tired. Very used up. He had been running on adrenalin for far too long, and it was time to sit down himself before he ended up on a stretcher next to his brother. He handed the laptop over to David Sinclair. "Here. Guard this with your life. The NSA is going to want it, and Charlie will go ballistic on you if it gets lost."

Small chuckle. "And we both know which of those scenarios is the most scary." David took a more firm grip on the slender electronic toy. "Don't worry, Don. I've got your back."

* * *

"I don't need a wheelchair," Colby grumbled. "It was my arm, not my leg."

They were a sorry lot to look for, Don reflected wryly. Colby and Don made book ends, each with an arm in a sling and crisp white bandages that wouldn't go through the sleeves of any shirt. There was Agent Wesson, balancing crutches on the footrest of his own wheelchair, the expression on his face making it clear that the man was pleased to still be alive. Even Megan sported a bruise on her cheek that she swore was from decking a terrorist and not from a falling cinder block. All the rest of the L.A. people that Megan had brought with her looked to be similarly worse for wear.

And Charlie. Don had had a short and unhappy discussion with his brother's doctor, cataloguing all the injuries received from the past three—had it only been three? It seemed longer—days. The black eye was the only visible injury, that and the heavy support bandage wrapped around his ankle, but the tired expression and the way his brother limply accepted help told the real story: three broken ribs and a touch of pneumonia that cause his brother to double over ever time he coughed. And the coughing would be—needed to be—frequent. Don reached over to touch his brother's wrist. "Charlie?"

Charlie forced a game smile. "Let's go home, Don. I really don't want to play with your friends any more. Keep me inside a nice, safe office. Okay?"

Don sighed, satisfied. His brother would be all right. The Eppes brothers had beaten the bullies once again.

One hell of a cross country trip. Plane: shot down. Train: assassins at every gate. Bullies of the terrorist variety, and Don was grateful to come out of this as well as they had. There was a jet waiting on the tarmac, a number of burly guards taking over the bodyguard detail that Colby had started. There was an NSA type waiting on board for his brother for a high security clearance, but Don had insisted that the plane head first for Los Angeles. Charlie's bosses had wanted the man flown directly to Washington, no stops at the local hospital in between, but Don had put his foot down. Charlie spent the night in a Cheyenne medical facility with plenty of tired but determined FBI guards in front of the door. Don himself had plopped himself in a chair by the bed until one of the nurse took pity on him and toted in something more comfortable.

The end result was that his entire team was now crawling onto a loaned Air Force jet. David already had his hand under Colby's arm, keeping the man on his feet until he could plop onto the wheelchair that had been brought to get him across the tarmac. Don crept out of the car that had brought them to the airport and started to offer assistance to his brother.

Oops. Not so good. Black spots wobbled in front of Don's own vision. Strong arms grabbed him.

Crap! How did he end up sitting down in this wheelchair?

A small chuckle floated down from somewhere above his head. "Wait your turn, boss," David said. "We've got VIP seats. The pilot will take off when we tell him to, and we get to go to the head of the take off queue."

"They've got so many flights here that they need a queue?" Don grumbled, more to have something to say than annoyed. Damn, but this chair felt good! How could a wheelchair feel comfortable?

As soon as he was sitting in a seat on the jet, he realized that it hadn't, and that this chair had the wheelchair beat hands down for comfort. A few minutes later, and Charlie was also carefully handed into the seat beside him, hands strapping him in for the flight home, the NSA agent frothing at the mouth to get at Professor Eppes.

Charlie caught his brother's eye. "No missiles this trip?"

Don smiled, closed his eyes, and settled himself back. It was going to be a long and satisfying next two hours toward home. "No missiles, buddy. No missiles."


End file.
